The Egg of Zero

The zero at the heart of these poems is not nothing -not simply absence, forgetting or loss, though there are moving elegies among them. This is a not-quite-definable O that gives surprising edge to life and language round it. Direct, meditative, playful, hyper-alert, Philip Gross's distinctively wide range of tones work together in a subtle, searching collection that addresses both the mind and heart. These poems explore the spaces that can open between buildings in a city street, in the shifting lights of love and ageing, or in the gaps between words. Heady and sobering, unsettling, celebratory, they come home with findings from the real world of the senses, heart and mind. Philip Gross won the T.S. Eliot Prize for his 2009 collection The Water Table.