The Water Table
by Philip Gross
Summary
The Water Table is a book about the Severn estuary, the brown, tide torn water between Wales and England with one of the highest tidal ranges in the world, and Philip Gross watches it the way a contemplative watches a candle: not for scenery but for what it can be made to say about existence itself. The poems return again and again to the crossings, the bridges, the mudflats, the shipping channel, and to water in every state the estuary offers, standing, running, rising, silting, and the Poetry Book Society's description caught the project exactly, an inquiry into what water is and does, which becomes an inquiry into embodiment, the self as another thing that holds its shape while everything in it moves through. Gross is a Quaker, and the poems have a Quaker's patience and mistrust of noise; the writing is exact, unshowy, and quietly virtuosic, long sequences built from short held breaths. He is also the son of an Estonian wartime refugee, a fact his other books address directly and this one carries as undertone, borders and crossings being family matter before they were subject matter. Gross had been publishing since the early 1980s, poetry alongside ten novels for young readers, radio work, and collaborations with artists and musicians, when The Water Table won the 2009 T.S. Eliot Prize, announced in January 2010, and the award recognized exactly the virtues fashion overlooks: patience, craft, and a subject held still long enough to open. It stands with the finest English poetry of water and margins.
Historical Context & Significance
Gross won the National Poetry Competition as far back as 1982 and an Eric Gregory Award the year before, then built an unusually wide career, professor of creative writing at the University of South Wales, children's novelist, librettist of a kind in his collaborations, so the 2009 Eliot Prize arrived as a career crowning rather than a discovery. The same season his collaboration with a photographer, I Spy Pinhole Eye, took Wales Book of the Year, an unusual double. The estuary he wrote sits at the center of British arguments about tidal power and rising seas, and the book's meditations on water's indifference to borders have only gained point; a Cholmondeley Award followed in 2017, and the estuary keeps its poet.