on Philip Gross

The Speaking Silences

Pine forests. Reed beds. A sea that is not quite a sea. A land that is not quite land. A people who come from many places and from nowhere. Habitations that rise up and sink back into the bog. In Philip Gross’s new volume, The Shores of Vaikus, all things exist in multiple dimensions. Not least the title. For Vaikus is not a place (or is it?): it is the Estonian word for ‘silence’. Also: tranquillity, hush, quietude, stillness, lull, peace, calm, quiet. This is language, and poetry, as shape-shifter.

The roots of this uncertainty lie in Gross’s background: his father was a Second World War refugee to Britain, and the post-1945 redrawing of Europe meant that Gross himself did not visit Estonia until well into adulthood. Like so many children of refugees, it was years before he learnt anything but whispers about the traumatic experiences of his father and family. He still speaks the language imperfectly (and it is a daunting language for European non-native speakers to learn, being Uralic, not Indo-European). All of this meant that the country has filled a potent, magical space in his imagination, though when he was finally able to visit after independence he found ‘a real, little, ordinary country’. It was almost a relief, ‘an entirely positive form of disappointment’.

Nevertheless, that is not the Estonia we encounter in this volume. It is divided into three sections, the central one of which, and much the longest, ‘Evi and the Devil’, consists of short, evocatory prose paragraphs, which disorientate even as they reveal a winding ...