The Water Table

Summary

Centered on the Severn Estuary—where fresh water meets salt, and the land is neither fully itself nor fully the sea—this collection explores shifting boundaries of all kinds, from ecology to language to the nature of the self. Gross writes with a scientific precision that never loses its sense of wonder, using the physical behaviour of water as a sustained metaphor for the instability of meaning. The collection was praised for its ability to make the mundane genuinely metaphysical.