Wasting Game

Of an earlier book, Terry Eagleton wrote: 'Philip Gross knows how to make silence and suggestion resonate... he touches an alien, intractable dimension...Gross's poems are about lost bearings and blurred frontiers...a landscape bereft of assured relationships, haunted by the just-missedness of human contact' (Independent on Sunday). These new poems reach towards closer engagement, whether with the realities of Estonia, his father's birthplace - visited for the First time - or with other loves and longings, never uncomplicated but handled even at their most difficult with tenderness and wit, nowhere more so that in the title-sequence about his daughter's struggle with anorexia. In the end, this is a book of life and hope.