In this edgy homage to Estonia, the country of his refugee father's birth, T S Eliot Prizewinner Philip Gross continues to develop the subtle conversation between words and silence that is at the core of his poetry.
At this collection's heart, the shapeshifting prose-poem monologues of this book's central sequence, Evi And The Devil, weave a haunted landscape out of folktale, dark humour, the routine atrocities of history and a vividly present sense of place. The island of Vaikus (one of several words for silence in Estonian) is Estonia condensed, refracted in the dark waters of a bog pool. The voice that speaks with such compelling otherness is a channelling of a culture and a disposition often drowned out in successive occupations by the empires of the day, but always alive, and whispering. The resulting book is both a bold departure and a drawing together of the whole range of a writing life.
'Philip Gross's latest collection, his twenty-eighth book, begins and ends with meditations on, among other things, silence. Between these two sections, entitled "Translating Silence", we meet the prose-poetry of Evi and The Devil. [...] Alongside his extraordinary yet historically based imaginative quest, he gives us glimpses which allow the reader to centre. For sharing a lifetime of seeing and feeling, and for honing and polishing the lens of his vision/craft, we can be deeply grateful.' Dana Littlepage Smith, The Friend, on The Shores of Vaikus
'Paradoxically, The Shores of Vaikus is both a timely and a timeless work. The past is curiously, hauntingly, alive along the shorelines and within the forests of present-day Estonia, the locus of Philip Gross's latest book. So much is liminal, evanescent [...] and the shadow-stories that impel these poems seem all the more chilling at a point in history when old patterns of empire-building are threatening to repeat themselves. [...] His tone is modest but his intelligence is fierce. In this his 28th book he's still seeking to do what the real poets do-to translate the world, and the significance that rests in its silences.' Stuart Henson, London Grip
'The Shores of Vaikus is a rich and rewarding collection, thanks largely to the adept deployment of language in ways that provide a welcome aesthetic jolt, but it is also a profound reflection on belonging not just only to our primary landscape, but to the earth as a whole. [...] It's a pleasure to read a volume of poetry that is so alert to the multifarious contingencies of history.' Tom Phillips, The High Window
