The Shores of Vaikus

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.

Born in Cornwall, son of an Estonian wartime refugee, Philip Gross has lived in Plymouth, Bristol and South Wales, where he was Professor of Creative Writing at Glamorgan University (USW). His 28th book of poetry, The Shores of Vaikus, is published by Bloodaxe in 2025. His previous collection, The Thirteenth Angel (2023), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2022. That followed eleven previous books with Bloodaxe, including Between the Islands (2020), A Bright Acoustic (2017), Love Songs of Carbon (2015), winner of the Roland Mathias Poetry Award and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; Deep Field (2011), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; The Water Table (2009), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2009; and Changes of Address: Poems 1980-1998 (2001), his selection from earlier books including The Ice Factory, Cat’s Whisker, The Son of the Duke of Nowhere, I.D. and The Wasting Game. His collaboration with photographer Simon Denison, I Spy Pinhole Eye (Cinnamon Press, 2009), won the Wales Book of the Year Award 2010.