Philip Gross Books

After the explosion at the shopping centre, Max is quick to confess. He did it. He planted the bomb. So when the police discover that there was no bomb-just a gas explosion-there are many questions to be asked. Who is Max and what is he trying to do?They're the questions Clio finds herself asking, too, when she starts to get to know Max. She's been asked to help get through to him-but almost before she realizes it she's been caught up in his lies. Now they're on the run together, hiding from the police-but why does Clio stay with him? She can'teven explain it to herself. And as she becomes less and less sure what is truth and what is lies, so events spiral ever closer towards a dramatic, violent end . . .

The sea that is always in sight, between us and beyond us, becomes a metaphor in Between the Islands for conversations between separated friends, but it is also the real sea of this planet, used and abused and in need of our care. Between the Islands is Philip Gross's 21st book of poetry, and his 11th from Bloodaxe.

"To turn, to dig, to plough, to upset, to translate… Bend, lap, journey, time..." The Welsh word troeon unfolds meaning after meaning. In TROEON : TURNINGS , two poets confident in their own traditions meet in the hinterland between translation and collaboration—Cyril Jones from the disciplines of Welsh cynghanedd, Philip Gross from the restless variety of English verse. Rather than lamenting the impossibility of reproducing any language’s unique knots of form and content in translation, they trust each other to explore the energies released. In the cloud chamber, atoms tear, spin, split, translate the past and future into spirals, spun silk, sheer release, the heart of the matter. In the same spirit, Valerie Coffin Price plays an equal part with striking letterpress designs that surprise the language of both writers into new awareness of its possibilities.

With each new collection, Philip Gross' poems extend their conversation between the metaphysical and the acutely physical. His sequences in The Thirteenth Angel scan from moment to moment like flickering needles, registering stress patterns in the world around us. This is Philip Gross's 27th book of poetry, and his 12th from Bloodaxe.