Philip Gross

Side by side

Yalta, 1945

Jigging the text, the torn tracts, till they slot
and settle, the inscribers of the coming age
lean back from the table. One folds a page
down, crisply. There’ll be i’s to dot
etcetera after lunch. Black pips of shot
in purple pigeon breasts (bred in the cage
for shotgun wars the house-guests wage)
are spat discreetly out, bones picked, and what
shudders of moon cross the lawn, what steel
zinging of bats as they stuka the lake . . . ?
The spoils of peace: the drafts and maps discarded,
numbers estimated who will wake to feel
the margins closing, run, sleep rough, take
their chance, ford rivers; the bridges are guarded.

Published with kind permission of the author and Bloodaxe.

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...