A Poetry Book Society Recommendation and shortlisted for the T S Eliot
Prize 2022. Philip Gross is a previous winner of the T S Eliot Prize for
The Water Table.
With each new book, 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 - ebbs and flows of
weather or events, in our own bodies, in the city streets before and
after the pandemic, or on the autoroutes of Europe with their undertow
of human flight.
If there are angels, they are nothing otherworldly, but formed by angles
of incidence between real immediate things, sudden moments of clarity
that may disturb, calm or exhilarate.