Bloodaxe Books Ltd

In these restlessly exploratory poems and sequences, the space between things is never empty, but alive with messages. Utterly physical even when it is at its most enquiring, Philip Gross's latest collection contemplates space and sound.

When she died, in 2009, Anthony Thwaite described U.A. Fanthorpe as a 'smiling subversive with a voice like bird-song'.

The two searching sequences that bookend this collection are not so much elegies as unfinished conversations with friends no longer living - friendships lost or neglected, with their closeness and distances sensitively mapped.

In his nineties Philip Gross's father, a wartime refugee, began to lose his several languages, first to deafness, then profound aphasia.

The Hopeful Hat is Carole Satyamurti's last collection. She was preparing these poems for publication at the time of her death, and left the manuscript in an advanced state of readiness.

In the course of forty years an increasingly subtle conversation has evolved between words and silence at the core of Philip Gross's poetry. This is never more so than in the poems of this edgy homage to Estonia, the country of his father's birth.

With each new collection, Philip Gross' poems extend their conversation between the metaphysical and the acutely physical.