The medieval Mappa Mundi showed the real world hedged about with wonders. Philip Gross's new poems are as vividly observed and sometimes fabulous as the traveler's tales of antiquity. Like those creatures in the margins of old maps they are hybrids of real longings, truth and lies. Each is a journey, open-ended and surprising, giving glimpses of the Middle East, the Pacific North-West, or a Europe of lost spas. These poems explore the spaces that can open between buildings in a city street, in the shifting lights of love aging, or in the gaps between words. Heady and sobering, unsettling, celebratory, they come home with findings from the real world of the senses, heart, and mind. A Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

"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." - Independent on Sunday

"Haunting, vividly imagined poems, whose fierce intelligence is gentled by the sonorous grace of the language… A considerable poetic talent offers us an elegant and subtle re-evaluation of the modern world." - The Guardian