The Thirteenth Angel

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.