Review: The Shores of Vaikus by Philip Gross

Mab Jones

A Question of Place

“The question isn’t where / so much as how to say it”. So begins one of the first poems in this collection, a piece entitled A Place Called Vaikus.

Some other poems possess similar titles: Now, In Vaikus; A Monument in Vaikus; Five Versions of Vaikus. The repetition suggests that the author is stepping into a new place; the unfamiliar name both spikes and intrigues the tongue, reminding of the word ‘viking’ and bringing to mind images of ancient tribes.

How to say it isn’t entirely clear, but through his evocation into the ‘where’, the ‘place called Vaikus’ is brought beautifully to life.

‘Vaikus’ also suggests, to me, explorations of fantastical vistas in series such as Star Trek: places I could not readily envisage. There is that same sense, here, of stepping entirely into the unknown, into a terrain that is like ours but also unalike.

Gross beams us down successfully through his balance of confidence and enquiry: sureness of artistry alongside a kind of intellectual light footedness that allows him to keep curiosity and wonder at the ready, and to use them as tools to pull the reader by the hand alongside him on this latest adventure.

Vaikus, we are told in the book’s blurb, is the spot in Estonia that Philip Gross’s father hailed from; a place of rocks and logs, peat and mud, wide skies and still waters, which are represented in photographic form on the book’s cover.

We are introduced to the “Kivikülv: stonefield” of these environs: landscapes that are “strewn through the forest, / a sowing of stones…” and which are considered by many to be “the greatest boulders” on Earth. These “grey beasts” take on life, history, and meaning, being “older than the elk”, their “Stone’s voice” apparent in the collection’s opening poems. “Lichen haired”, they are imbued with an almost figurative presence, acting as ambassadors, a welcoming party, or guardians in the first part of the book as the poet moves through the land, through this field, and on to its “last boulders”.

Daring Other People

The place, then, is named; but others, in this first section of this collection, and then the third and final section, are not. Gross places a focus in these upon place and the elements and animals of place, rather than upon people.

Thus, there is “May sun”, “a strand of” moon, wind, tides, beings such as beetles, birds, and bees, “a ragged / seam of geese”, “one crow’s croak”, and a fantastic, richly-written forest.

However, humans are indeed present: aside from the poet himself, there are echoes of them found in empty houses, “door skewed / on a hinge”, and in hotels; in the poet’s romantic notions of long-lost forest hermits; in the echoes of lives written on tombstones and the “Huge beautiful surreal graffiti” that “blossoms” inside a tower.

There are glimpses of others, too, here and there, but perhaps most affectingly, there is a glimpse of Gross’s own parent, which pulls the rest of the collection into perspective: this is the poet’s fatherland, after all, and his father’s ghost-memory, in a way, lives here still, making this collection a search for someone who, achingly, is now no longer, we assume, alive.

Against an imagined, not even real, bonfire – an analogy of a bonfire, in fact, conjured from a confluence of light and a swarm of bees – Gross states “I could see / my father’s silhouette against it”. This short sentence, half hidden within parentheses, seems slightly throwaway, whimsical, even, its willo-the-wisp imagery all light and air: but it struck me with the force of a dropped boulder.

Acting as a kind of parentheses themselves, these first and third sections hold within them a second, longer section, that holds humanity at its core.

Evi and the Devil is a tale told in the voice of a little girl, a feat I find, for a male poet, quite wonderful.

Weaving myth, fable, folklore, and fairytale, with seams of dark humour, peril, and politics, this first-person story is set out in pebble- or breadcrumb-like pieces of poetic prose that show the “Squabbles and scuffles and clanging alarms” of life, its playgrounds and bullets, saunas and missiles, all through the eyes of a lively, life-affirming “ferretchild” who is quite charming in her way.

Luminous

This is a book which takes the idea of ‘poems of place’ and experiments with the concept, pushing gently at structure and form, always with a kind of high, airy lyricism in its language that is, at the same time, earthy and grounded in the real; that is marvellously fluid, following unusual paths between signifiers and imagery.

Gross is a poet who isn’t afraid to play, in the very highest sense of that word; alliteration and assonance are techniques you learn early on, but here they are fully absorbed and utilised, providing a luminous lyricism which subtly elevates and enlivens.

Thus, a piece of sky is “duplicitous blue”, the repeated ‘u’ sound reinforcing the sense of something falling, from high to low.

Looking back from a boat, Gross spies “the gull speckled nick of the dock”, the interplay of ‘l’ and ‘ck’ sounds suggestive of the speckling and reinforcing the image of where the dock is set.

Alongside these, and other, techniques, exists a fine awareness of silence, too, that provides another element of interplay, and its own kind of elevation within the book. As one example, a beautiful final poem combines imagery of swifts, their “squeal-sweep” wing sounds becoming the central ‘voice’ of the piece as the poet and companion “sit, words done for the day”.

In silence, other voices, other beings, the ‘other’ of the great wide world beyond “the open windows”, come to be heard.

“And / the longer you sit, the grander it grows” – true in this poem, and of my own experience with The Shores of Vaikus. Gross’s 28th book, published by Bloodaxe, glistens with soul and intelligence.

Open the window of its pages and let its wonderful words wash over you.