The Water Table

By Philip Gross

Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize. 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 Mr 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 inplaces, but dealing ultimately with real questions of human existence'
-- Simon Armitage, T.S. Eliot Prize judges' comment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Jul 21, 2011
• ISBN: 9781780370118

Philip Gross

Born in Cornwall, son of an Estonian wartime refugee, Philip Gross has lived in Plymouth, Bristol, and latterly South Wales, where he was Professor of Creative Writing at Glamorgan University (USW). His 27th collection, The Thirteenth Angel (2022), is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and is shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2022. It follows 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. Since The Air Mines of Mistila (with Sylvia Kantaris, Bloodaxe Books, 1988), he has been a keen collaborator, most recently with artist Valerie Coffin Price on A Fold in the River (2015), with poet Lesley Saunders on A Part of the Main (2018), and with Welsh-language bardd Cyril Jones on Troeon/Turnings (2021). I Spy Pinhole Eye (Cinnamon Press, 2009), with photographer Simon Denison, won the Wales Book of the Year Award 2010. He received a Cholmondeley Award in 2017. Philip Gross's poetry for young people includes Manifold Manor, The All-Nite Café (winner of the Signal Award 1994), Off Road to Everywhere (winner of the CLPE Award 2011) and the poetry-science collection Dark Sky Park (shortlisted for the CLiPPA award 2019).

Book preview

Sluice Angel

Low tide at the sea lock,

            a forty foot drop to muddy shallows…

                       One boat’s width

            of channel that the dredger grubs up

                        daily… Silt to one side scored in circles

                                    where they dragged for don’t ask what…

The tall shut doors of the hall

            of the world at which the weight of water,

                        of incipience, does not need to knock:

            feel it there like a shudder

                        of difference, the engine of change.

                                    Now, almost soundless, hinges shift.

With a gradual calibrated rip

            like a concord of lathes, with a crypt smell,

                        two green-grey-brown stiffening blades

            of water fold in. They curve, feathering

                       themselves in free fall:            wings

                                    flexed, shuddering, not to soar

but to pour themselves down, to earth

            the charge, liquid solid as rock

                       and untouchable, trouncing itself

            to a froth, to exhaustion, till with a sigh

                        the gates can open, and the world,

                                    our world, small craft, come through.

Betweenland I

A body of water: water’s body

that seems to have a mind (and

change it: isn’t that what makes

a mind, its changing?) not much

prone to thinking – rather, thoughts

curl through it, salt or fresh, or hang

between states; sometimes gloss

the surface with their oil-illuminations.

Wind-worried to dullness, pulled two ways

(earth and moon like parents not quite

in accord), unquiet body, it can never

quite lay down its silt; always trying

to be something other, to be sky,

to lose itself in absolute reflection.

Betweenland II

Mud,

         the megatonnage of it, moving

in suspension, heavy haulage, to and fro.

A weight you can see,

                                  the way it stands

off the Point, its deep whorls scarcely

moving, scarcely filling:

                                  clay shapes

turned on a wheel, leather hard already. One

spins off now like a slow world,

                                                like a question

about nothing it can put a name to,

                                                   an