Poetry review – THE SHORES OF VAIKUS: Stuart Henson is captivated by this myth-like sequence of sometimes cruel, sometimes enchanting prose-poems by Philip Gross
The Shores of Vaikus
Philip Gross
Bloodaxe
ISBN 978-1-78037-717-9
£12.00
Paradoxically, The Shores of Vaikus is both a timely and a timeless work. The past is curiously, hauntingly, alive along the shorelines and within the forests of present-day Estonia, the locus of Philip Gross’s latest book. So much is liminal, evanescent—as delicate as anything you might find in John Burnside—and the shadow-stories that impel these poems seem all the more chilling at a point in history when old patterns of empire-building are threatening to repeat themselves. The structure of the collection, which grew out of Gross’s return to the land of his father and grandparents, is tripartite. At its heart lies a myth-like sequence of prose-poems book-ended by two sections of descriptive-philosophical lyrics with the same enigmatic title, Translating the Silence. ‘Vaikus’ is indeed ‘one of the several words for silence in Estonian’, and silence is more than a condition: it’s a place, an island, and sometimes the only option where speech—or the written word—confronts the monstrosity of politics.
Gross is a master of free verse. There’s little of rhyme and metre in this book but there’s an abundance of word-music. By way of example I wanted to quote from “The Old Country”, the poem that opens the collection. There was a line or two… and then I realised that the images I’d planned to highlight are part of one long delicately unspooling sentence, a development of ideas and a rhythm of thought that is itself a part of their meaning:
The storm moved over last night
letting the sea down again, that Baltic flatness
slightly darkened, with a battered look,
while here in the summer house garden
May sun is teasing up wisps from the eaves
and from the cut ends in a log-pile
so perfectly, end-stopped,
with such understanding of each log’s different
place together, that a night of storm
is nothing but steam rising –
that and the honey-tart tang of pine sap
reawakening, and that sound
which is this year’s new wasp
bent to its diligence, scraping a track in the wood,
straight, pale, already digesting
to paper spit pulp, to nest, to layers
of inwardness, chamber into chamber, word of mouth,
recollecting itself. Almost weightless.
So perfectly end-stopped; so perfectly enjambed; so attentive to sound and shape and process. It’s tempting to see even the offset layout of the stanzas as reminiscent of the log-pile—and the wasp layering its chambers of inwardness as akin to the poet, bent to his diligence.
Readers of these London Grip reviews will know that I’m not inclined to go overboard with superlatives, but the central sequence, Evi and the Devil, strikes me as an outstanding achievement: original, subtle, and free of judgement. Its protagonist could easily be one of those girls from Estonian folk-lore, the sort who discover a fish with a woman inside, or meet seducing spirits from the otherworld. Evi’s voice is, in Gross’s words, ‘not a moralising one, and not necessarily a kind one either.’ One patriarchal figure ‘with his spyglass and his spats and his scholarly manner’ who calls her “My little ferretchild” gets typically short shrift:
… Naturalist, my arse. I was something he’d let slip, he
thought, half a lifetime ago. So be it. I led him deep into the forest,
turned him twice about, and vanished. Maybe the real wild things
got him, I didn’t go back to check.
Gross is ambivalent about whether he is in fact inhabiting Evi’s voice, or she is inhabiting him. In either case she (or he) is the perfect vehicle for the kind of observations he (or she) needs to make about nature, history and the power-dynamics of human interaction.
One of my teachers was full of questions, so much that I thought
he must be empty inside; all our answers didn’t seem to be enough
to fill him up. He asked us about sums, geography and verbs and,
bit by bit, our relatives too. Sometimes he wrote things down, as if
they were too heavy for one head to hold.So I learned about questions.
How sometimes there’d be strangers on the doorstep, who seemed
to know exactly what you’d said.
Evi’s mother calls her a changeling. She runs off into the trees, into the landscapes that lie on the margins of the past and the present. She provokes. She speaks truths. She keeps, tucked in a tree root, a biscuit tin of immeasurable size, full of small wonders—a perfect metaphor for the poem as a whole—and makes no-nonsense observations, often employing beautiful and delicately-wrought language:
A fine rain smoking downwards, round the single streetlamp. Or is
the spilled light steaming upwards? Two illusions passing through
each other…
Sometimes, smoke seems to be trying to write its own name.
Cursively, but failing. …
Evi may be a shape-shifter, but her antagonist, the Devil, is protean too. Even halfway through the two-hundred-odd prose-paragraphs, I hadn’t really pinned him down. When he appears, it’s almost always in male form, but he has female accomplices.
The Devil cornered me as I was on my way home, out too late.
Ha-hah! he said, and Hah! in case I missed it the first time.You know
what devils do with juicy little girls like you. I do, I said, Aunt
Katri told me. What? he said. Eat us, I said. Ho-hoh! Worse than
that. We slobber all over you while we do it. Uh-huh. She said
that too. He leaned very close up. Even in your inmost creases, he
breathed in my ear. Uh-huh. She said that too? Oh yes, you and
Aunt Katri, you agree about everything. You ought to get married.
Hrruh! he snorted, but he went off through the woods in her
direction, carefully brushing his tail.
Like any folkloric trickster Evi is witty, and more than capable of standing up for herself in a one-to-one encounter, but this Devil has manifestations that are more quotidian—and more sinister. He can be a postman, with a sack full of letters from the ‘wide world’ with their ‘pretty duplicitous stamps’ who ‘seems to own the world and lies anyway, because he likes to.’ He has a boss, ‘as his boss has, and his. And so on maybe forever.’ He presides over a pit of grey flames ‘in triplicate’. He’s worn out with devilry. He takes to drink: ‘Polish vodka, cheaper than potatoes, from the village shop.’ (Perhaps one of his ancestors was the lumpen Estonian myth-ogre Vanapagan.) You might possibly feel a bit sorry for him. Evi does when he gets out of his ‘fat black car’ swarmed about by grandchildren who look just like him ‘only tiny, bright, chippy as hornets and bristling with toys.’ I don’t think it needs a spoiler alert before I tell you she even offers him a way out, ‘into the thicket’, while she attracts the kiddies’ attention. That’s the trouble with Evi, she can be wicked too—as Philip Gross admits—‘in a most creative way’.
There are numerous incidental characters, including a Youth Leader to whom Evi is sent for lessons in smiling, and uncle Märt who as a boy could make clever things like a hawk-kite so realistic that the rabbits froze with terror. (‘Later, he got a job in State Security.’) They populate a dream-scape of flat lands and forest villages that’s been continuously invaded and over-run for thousands of years—by Vikings from the north, traders from Byzantium, forces of the Russian Empire, blond people from the east, the post-war Russian occupation… Each wave has left its marks: ‘soft tumps under the pine-litter… torn concrete like stale bread or a snapped sinew of steel rod’ and ‘inexplicit low domes’ that are ready to rupture and ‘talcum-puff their malevolent spores to the wind.’ This is the realm the faerie Evi inhabits, often with impish black humour. (‘The isle is full of notices curt words explaining that the point beyond this place is not.’) Like some latter-day Caliban, she’s constrained to a place of abandonment—a border country where the quick and the dead cohabit, separated only by fences the living can’t walk through. And Evi is a seer. These poems were written before the struggle in Ukraine reached its current nadir, but her vision from the invisible mountain at the centre of the island is frighteningly prescient:
…From the top I saw the sea all round us. Grey ships, with
noses like sharks. A fat black submarine. And towers of the
Kremlin that way, and New York the other. Burning.
It’s a contemporary Waste Land, various, cruel and enchanting, and so full of little shining shards of discovery there’s not space to do justice to them all here. Each prose-poem is a nugget: wry, witty, lyrical, humane. Sometimes, especially towards the end, the voice of Evi and the voice of the poet are indistinguishable. Philip Gross has been there to ‘look for his roots’ and found a kind of spirit double.
She… She… Hold on. Who? Who said ‘she’? She was only what I
told you. Who says ‘I’, for that matter? Or ‘said’? Sometimes we
stand on the edge (together) of a great abyss.
In the Bloodaxe launch video Gross reminds us that ‘The voices of the Earth are plural’. The place called Vaikus is an Estonia, but it’s also a state of mind, a disposition, a kind of inwardness. (That word again!) The membrane between the central sequence and the surrounding sections is a permeable one. The last dozen prose-poems segue into the following sequence, “Now, in Vaikus”, with only a slight change in mood and method. The poem/paragraphs, separated once again by asterisks, speak a kind of communion with the landscape that comes only with deep observation akin to meditation.
One crow’s croak. Across the water, one house, and another,
in the far woods; there are villages, I know, and have to believe,
but this evening’s lesson is on the one-ness of things.
Their one-by-one-ness, all together. This is more than unity.
Philip Gross has been around for long enough to have no need to show us a self. He’s always been more inclined simply to reveal what he’s seen. His tone is modest but his intelligence is fierce. In this his 28th book he’s still seeking to do what the real poets do—to translate the world, and the significance that rests in its silences. He knows that he may never become fluent in Estonian; he may not get beyond ‘a scrap-bag / of vocabulary, the vowel sounds all askew // and no syntax to hold it’.
But then,
by then, if I am fluent in the silence
I might already have got
where language works so hard to go.
Feb 26 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Philip Gross
Poetry review – THE SHORES OF VAIKUS: Stuart Henson is captivated by this myth-like sequence of sometimes cruel, sometimes enchanting prose-poems by Philip Gross
Paradoxically, The Shores of Vaikus is both a timely and a timeless work. The past is curiously, hauntingly, alive along the shorelines and within the forests of present-day Estonia, the locus of Philip Gross’s latest book. So much is liminal, evanescent—as delicate as anything you might find in John Burnside—and the shadow-stories that impel these poems seem all the more chilling at a point in history when old patterns of empire-building are threatening to repeat themselves. The structure of the collection, which grew out of Gross’s return to the land of his father and grandparents, is tripartite. At its heart lies a myth-like sequence of prose-poems book-ended by two sections of descriptive-philosophical lyrics with the same enigmatic title, Translating the Silence. ‘Vaikus’ is indeed ‘one of the several words for silence in Estonian’, and silence is more than a condition: it’s a place, an island, and sometimes the only option where speech—or the written word—confronts the monstrosity of politics.
Gross is a master of free verse. There’s little of rhyme and metre in this book but there’s an abundance of word-music. By way of example I wanted to quote from “The Old Country”, the poem that opens the collection. There was a line or two… and then I realised that the images I’d planned to highlight are part of one long delicately unspooling sentence, a development of ideas and a rhythm of thought that is itself a part of their meaning:
The storm moved over last night letting the sea down again, that Baltic flatness slightly darkened, with a battered look, while here in the summer house garden May sun is teasing up wisps from the eaves and from the cut ends in a log-pile so perfectly, end-stopped, with such understanding of each log’s different place together, that a night of storm is nothing but steam rising – that and the honey-tart tang of pine sap reawakening, and that sound which is this year’s new wasp bent to its diligence, scraping a track in the wood, straight, pale, already digesting to paper spit pulp, to nest, to layers of inwardness, chamber into chamber, word of mouth, recollecting itself. Almost weightless.So perfectly end-stopped; so perfectly enjambed; so attentive to sound and shape and process. It’s tempting to see even the offset layout of the stanzas as reminiscent of the log-pile—and the wasp layering its chambers of inwardness as akin to the poet, bent to his diligence.
Readers of these London Grip reviews will know that I’m not inclined to go overboard with superlatives, but the central sequence, Evi and the Devil, strikes me as an outstanding achievement: original, subtle, and free of judgement. Its protagonist could easily be one of those girls from Estonian folk-lore, the sort who discover a fish with a woman inside, or meet seducing spirits from the otherworld. Evi’s voice is, in Gross’s words, ‘not a moralising one, and not necessarily a kind one either.’ One patriarchal figure ‘with his spyglass and his spats and his scholarly manner’ who calls her “My little ferretchild” gets typically short shrift:
Gross is ambivalent about whether he is in fact inhabiting Evi’s voice, or she is inhabiting him. In either case she (or he) is the perfect vehicle for the kind of observations he (or she) needs to make about nature, history and the power-dynamics of human interaction.
Evi’s mother calls her a changeling. She runs off into the trees, into the landscapes that lie on the margins of the past and the present. She provokes. She speaks truths. She keeps, tucked in a tree root, a biscuit tin of immeasurable size, full of small wonders—a perfect metaphor for the poem as a whole—and makes no-nonsense observations, often employing beautiful and delicately-wrought language:
Evi may be a shape-shifter, but her antagonist, the Devil, is protean too. Even halfway through the two-hundred-odd prose-paragraphs, I hadn’t really pinned him down. When he appears, it’s almost always in male form, but he has female accomplices.
Like any folkloric trickster Evi is witty, and more than capable of standing up for herself in a one-to-one encounter, but this Devil has manifestations that are more quotidian—and more sinister. He can be a postman, with a sack full of letters from the ‘wide world’ with their ‘pretty duplicitous stamps’ who ‘seems to own the world and lies anyway, because he likes to.’ He has a boss, ‘as his boss has, and his. And so on maybe forever.’ He presides over a pit of grey flames ‘in triplicate’. He’s worn out with devilry. He takes to drink: ‘Polish vodka, cheaper than potatoes, from the village shop.’ (Perhaps one of his ancestors was the lumpen Estonian myth-ogre Vanapagan.) You might possibly feel a bit sorry for him. Evi does when he gets out of his ‘fat black car’ swarmed about by grandchildren who look just like him ‘only tiny, bright, chippy as hornets and bristling with toys.’ I don’t think it needs a spoiler alert before I tell you she even offers him a way out, ‘into the thicket’, while she attracts the kiddies’ attention. That’s the trouble with Evi, she can be wicked too—as Philip Gross admits—‘in a most creative way’.
There are numerous incidental characters, including a Youth Leader to whom Evi is sent for lessons in smiling, and uncle Märt who as a boy could make clever things like a hawk-kite so realistic that the rabbits froze with terror. (‘Later, he got a job in State Security.’) They populate a dream-scape of flat lands and forest villages that’s been continuously invaded and over-run for thousands of years—by Vikings from the north, traders from Byzantium, forces of the Russian Empire, blond people from the east, the post-war Russian occupation… Each wave has left its marks: ‘soft tumps under the pine-litter… torn concrete like stale bread or a snapped sinew of steel rod’ and ‘inexplicit low domes’ that are ready to rupture and ‘talcum-puff their malevolent spores to the wind.’ This is the realm the faerie Evi inhabits, often with impish black humour. (‘The isle is full of notices curt words explaining that the point beyond this place is not.’) Like some latter-day Caliban, she’s constrained to a place of abandonment—a border country where the quick and the dead cohabit, separated only by fences the living can’t walk through. And Evi is a seer. These poems were written before the struggle in Ukraine reached its current nadir, but her vision from the invisible mountain at the centre of the island is frighteningly prescient:
It’s a contemporary Waste Land, various, cruel and enchanting, and so full of little shining shards of discovery there’s not space to do justice to them all here. Each prose-poem is a nugget: wry, witty, lyrical, humane. Sometimes, especially towards the end, the voice of Evi and the voice of the poet are indistinguishable. Philip Gross has been there to ‘look for his roots’ and found a kind of spirit double.
In the Bloodaxe launch video Gross reminds us that ‘The voices of the Earth are plural’. The place called Vaikus is an Estonia, but it’s also a state of mind, a disposition, a kind of inwardness. (That word again!) The membrane between the central sequence and the surrounding sections is a permeable one. The last dozen prose-poems segue into the following sequence, “Now, in Vaikus”, with only a slight change in mood and method. The poem/paragraphs, separated once again by asterisks, speak a kind of communion with the landscape that comes only with deep observation akin to meditation.
Philip Gross has been around for long enough to have no need to show us a self. He’s always been more inclined simply to reveal what he’s seen. His tone is modest but his intelligence is fierce. In this his 28th book he’s still seeking to do what the real poets do—to translate the world, and the significance that rests in its silences. He knows that he may never become fluent in Estonian; he may not get beyond ‘a scrap-bag / of vocabulary, the vowel sounds all askew // and no syntax to hold it’.