The Water Table
Poetry for all places says Peter Bennet
The Water Table by Philip Gross. Bloodaxe Books. ISBN: 1 85224 852 1. £8.95. Philip Gross has had a distinguished career as a writer and teacher while managing to avoid becoming a household name. He has written fiction, children’s opera, radio plays, horror and science fiction as well as poetry. The Water Table, which has just won the TS Eliot Prize, is his seventh collection, and very good indeed. The first thing to strike me was fluidity of form. There are deftly handled traditional shapes, such as ‘Severn Shore’, in rhyming quatrains, and ‘Fantasia on a Theme from IKEA’, which is a sequence of seven sonnets, but many of the poems seem to writhe and shiver, at times as if impatient with the constrictions of the page. This is highly appropriate given the watery nature of the book’s prevailing locations, never far from the Bristol Channel.
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