A powerful and ambiguous body of water lies at the heart of these poems, with shoals and channels that change with the forty-foot tide. Even the name is fluid – from one shore, the Bristol Channel, from the other Môr Hafren, the Severn Sea.

Philip Gross’s meditations move with subtle steps between these shifting grounds and those of the man-made world, the ageing body and that ever-present mystery, the self. Admirers of his work know each new collection is a new stage; this one marks a crossing into a new questioning, new clarity and depth.

'A book of great clarity and concentration, continually themed but always lively and alert in its use of language. Gross takes us from Great Flood to subtly invoked concerns for our watery planet; this is a mature and determined book, dream-like in places, but dealing ultimately with real questions of human existence' - Simon Armitage, T.S. Eliot Prize judges' comment.

‘Philip Gross knows how to make silence and suggestion resonate… he touches an alien, intractable dimension… Gross’s poems are about lost bearings and blurred frontiers’ – Terry Eagleton, Independent on Sunday.

‘Haunting, vividly imagined poems, whose fierce intelligence is gentled by the sonorous grace of the language… A considerable poetic talent offers us an elegant and subtle re-evaluation of the modern world’ – Sarah Crown, The Guardian.

‘Some of the poems are marvellous, not because they are brave about their subject, not even because of the technique on display, but because they are electrifyingly well observed and beautifully written’ – David Morley, Poetry Review.

‘This marvellous collection… The poems are destabilising but revelatory visions of the world…The tensions between his close attention to qualities and the wit and bravura with which he interprets them is held by the scope of his linguistic resources and technique… I repeat: buy and view the world anew! – astonished!’ – Judy Gahagan, Ambit.