Philip Gross

Side by side

The Boat Made of Poems

sings and hums and talks and whispers to itself.
              It never sleeps.
It groans, it shudders to the rhythm of the waves.
              Its timbers creak
in the language of every port it has put into –
              the backchat, the patois,
the babble, the Babel, the smuggled rich lingo
              of each dockside bar.
But hush: don’t tell the captain or the bosun
              or the loosely rhyming crew:
                      there’s really nothing to it, poetry,
just air, hot air and paper, oh, and skill
              and love and hope, between them
                           and the deep dark silent sea.

The poem forms part of the sequence “Dreams of an Inland Lighthouse-keeper”. Published with kind permission of the author and Salt Publishing.

Philip Gross

(United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 1952)

Philip Gross was born in 1952 in Cornwall, and grew up in Plymouth. Since 2004 he has lived and worked in South Wales. With a Cornish mother and an Estonian father, Gross has emerged as one of the greatest poetic voices of displacement, conveying what Terry Eagleton views as "lost bearings and blurred frontiers" (Independent on Sunday). He won an Eric Gregory Award in 1981 and, in the following...