Egg of Zero

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 26th collection, Between the Islands (2020), follows ten previous books with Bloodaxe, including 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; 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, 2020), he has been a keen collaborator, most recently with artist Valerie Coffin Price on A Fold in the River (2015) and with poet Lesley Saunders on A Part of the Main (2018). 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.

'Nature, people, the obscurities of one's self, yield up their otherness in those epiphanic moments when Gross' peripheral eyesight catches them off guard. His is a voice that is mordant, obsessive, compelling - but nonetheless grateful for the rewards of living' - "PBS Bulletin". '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". 'He should be recognised as one of England's very best poets, not only for the exuberance of his imagination, but because of what he is writing about' - John Greening, "Times Literary Supplement". 'Many of the poems convey a deep awareness of this fragility and downright improbability that forms the core of our lives...[enabling] us better to treasure our "ordinary" moments - the taken-for granted, charted ground' - Kate Keogan, "Acumen".