Arte e Cultura
Philip Gross' New Work Launches in Cardiff
During the event, Philip read from and talked about his new collection that explores his father's loss of language, to deafness and aphasia, in old age. Moving and thought-provoking, there are poems about age, about family, about displacement (Philip's father was a wartime refugee from Estonia ) and about language itself.
Commenting on the book Philip said, "Of all my books, Deep Field is maybe closest to my heart, not just because it a memorial to my father and his courage faced with deafness and aphasia. It is also a celebration of language and the human voice, the thing that links us even when the words desert us."
In his nineties Philip's father, a wartime refugee, began to lose his several languages, first to deafness, then profound aphasia. Deeply thought as well as deeply felt, these poems reach into that gulf to find him - through recovery of histories both spoken and unspoken as well as an excavation of the spoken word itself.
Philip Gross won the TS Eliot prize for poetry in 2010 for his work The Water Table. The prize is known as the UK's most lucrative and high profile poetry prize.
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