Sometimes the structure of a poetry book may present itself as an image, one that is as intrinsic to the work as a whole as an image may be to an individual poem. The Shores of Vaikus appears to be several books bound together in a rather unusual format: two sets, of more or less equal length, of substantial open-form landscape poems, both titled ‘Translating Silence’, divided by 48 pages of short prose-poems titled ‘Evi and the Devil’ and sent off with an elegant envoi, ‘Another Shore’.

At first sight, this looks awkward, maybe simply a bundling together of different projects into something substantial enough to be collection-length? And then I started to notice references throughout to water-levels and horizon-lines, and wondered whether perhaps it could be viewed, metaphorically, in vertical profile ­– maybe as a book or a folder with broad flaps joined by an unusually deep binding. To see such a project properly, in concrete form, might need the kind of equipment supplied to readers in archives and rare book collections: cushions to support the flaps, and allow one to read across them, too, while providing a space for the spine to open gently, revealing a broad gully, a dip down to another level.

We may have seen this sump-shape before in Gross’s poetry.  The emptied sea-lock in the poem ‘Sluice Angel’ with its ‘forty foot drop to muddy shallows’, its ‘[si]lt . . . scored in circles’, for example, and the ‘square /stone sink’ at the heart of ‘The Drowned Book’. In landscape terms, the prose poems seem located in some sort of low country, open to floods and invasion, inhabited by the vulnerable: traumatized children, the very old. Maybe also, in some sense, a dumping-ground, a place into which all kinds of noisy and disruptive things have been tipped, away from the calm reach of the upper levels.

Where exactly is this located, geographically speaking? The book’s title is intriguingly slippery, especially taken in conjunction with the cover image, a beautiful photo by the author that is spread over back and front, showing a shoreline littered with strange, unearthly boulders. One might think that this shows ‘Vaikus’, and speculate that Vaikus is an island off the coast of Estonia (or indeed another name for Estonia, Gross’s refugee father’s fatherland), but a caption tells us that it is ‘the shore of Käsmu, Estonia’, which places it on the Käsmu peninsula in the north of the country, west of Tallinn, on the Gulf of Finland. The stones are erratics, and it looks as if the photo is taken at low tide, revealing the pale stripes of horizontal tide-marks. In fact, as the cover blurb explains, vaikus is not an actual place, but one of several words for silence in Estonian.

Silence, the subject of much of Gross’s previous work, has a watery quality in this book, and his writing about it here is often a transcription into landscape, drawing attention to the lines of water that run across a piece of land seen in vertical profile: sea-levels, the line of the horizon, lines around which small and large and large shifts are continually happening, often very slowly. This isn’t a place for surge and rush, unlike the human interventions (locks and flooded valleys) of ‘Sluice Angel’ and ‘The Drowned Book’; instead, typically in the outer sections of the book, it’s space as might be defined by terms used for meditation: a topography that is open, broad, undramatic, a process of letting-go. On the shores of the nearly tideless Baltic Gross finds a ‘stillness which is anything / but static: [a] slow, wide, bay-wide swell too slight // to notice, almost’ (p 21).

An early poem in the book, ‘A Place Called Vaikus’ addresses the issue of location indirectly, transformed into a downward slide, a vertical movement contrasting with (a repeated motif in this book) the horizontal flight of birds across the sky:

 

The question isn’t where

so much as how to say it. Say:

             like sinking into a pool

             of peat-brown water in a marsh

 

from one horizon to the other

only linked by the seep-seep

          stitching of whimbrel in flight.

           Down here it’s dark

 

until the mud you’ve stirred up

settles

 

          round a glint, a word

 

passed in a language you don’t understand

between the sunlight

          in the other world

that of continually changing

 

and a bronze axe

thrown into forever

          only yesterday

          four thousand years ago. (p 17)

 

The central parts of this poem give a foreshadowing of some of the themes and tones in the prose-poems section; here ‘are red-capped mushrooms / to and fro between the trees / like drops of blood marking a path’ along with fantastical windmills, stories a child might recognize (p 18), and the ghost-like presence of ‘other countries / which are this one’ which haunt forests, offshore islands and even ‘in mirror-glass, downtown’ where the speaker finds himself caught in ‘a nuance of sunlight from ten /storeys up (Swedbank . . .  the Radisson Hotel . . .)’ and  ‘looking up as if bewitched’, not only  ‘soundless / as on a web cam’, but, in a memorable phrase, ‘on a live feed to the dead.’ (19)

 

The final stanza, however, opens up even wider, to the harsh realities of 21^stcentury geopolitics:

 

. . . the stir

 

in the gunmetal heart of neighbours

brooding on the brittleness

of empires, how their fractured

                     edges can be honed

to lacerate. That we are in the grip

of larger shifts and flows than us

is no surprise. From time to time

                     the time comes

                              and we know. (p 20)

 

This is followed by ‘Erratics’, whose first section focuses on a ‘stray boulder that rode / the ice train down / from Finland’ and which ‘now stands / waist-deep in tideless Baltic – you could wade to it’, and an exquisite description of the fine movements of light around the water-line; where the ‘bay-wide swell’ mentioned above shows up in

 

                               . . . up-ripples of light

the evening sun takes from its lift and dip

 

translated to the different-angled face of each

stone, cooling but look, melting upwards – boulders

 

as unsure as I am of the down or up of things

reflected. Floating on the surface, on recumbent sky. (p 21)

 

The theme of movement around a horizontal line is revisited in ‘The Crossing’, the poem that ends the first ‘Translating Silence’ section, observing how islands seen from sea-level (as opposed to being seen from the air) seem to rise and ‘float up’ and in doing so create the conditions for separation. The final image for the islands’ emergence over the horizon, softly worded though it may be, is remarkable, a sudden, surprising incursion of bureaucracy, noticing ‘how they part along the seam, quite gently, / / like a dotted line between the real and the unreal, / with an instruction: tear here.’ (p 26)

The central section of the book, ‘Evi and the Devil’, into which, it seems, one enters by going down, as in ‘going down to the woods’, is very different in tone as well as form, the prose-poems a rag-bag of fairy tale and tittle-tattle, bursting out noisily with stories of bullying and treachery, a child’s-eye version of local histories spiced with cruelty, arbitrary spitefulness and homely detail.  It has parents and grandparents in it, as well as teachers and soldiers, a Glass Man and a Crane Beak woman, each in their own ways vulnerable-spiky to the point of injuring others as well as themselves. The Devil doesn’t appear as often as the title might suggest, but he’s a powerful presence nonetheless. He accosts Evi ‘on [her] way home, out too late’. Forewarned by Aunt Katri, she sends him packing, though he goes ‘off through the woods in her direction, carefully brushing his tail’ (p 37).

Almost as sinister, we discover he’s part of the system, a postman and stamp collector: ‘See him licking his little translucent sticky hinges, arranging the lies, the pretty ones and the important-looking ones, on the squared pages in his album.’ (p 33) When last seen, ‘he was quite deflated . . . all his randy and ravenous belching bragging grandeur long gone’, but not harmless. He may have ‘looked like a ruptured puffball’, but Evi can see

All those tiny spores of wicked scattered on the wind. Feel them, grit in your eye, or itching where you can’t reach. Peppering the papers, statutes, rulebooks – they might look like stops and commas but they are the snags, every bureaucrat knows, on which the future, yours and mine included, hangs. Even now. (p 76)

Just as the prose-poem form allows this kind of fantasy to grow fast, branching in many directions before ending, as here, abruptly, with a warning, so the sizeable collection of them that forms the central section of The Shores of Vaikus (over 200 pieces) can range from whimsy (the idea that the highest unclimbed mountains are endangered, might be invited to ‘[H]ead west. Come and hide, however hopelessly, here’ (p 75)) to dark anecdote (an uncle plunging used lead bullets, drips from ‘a grey candle’ into a ‘quivering melt’ of boiling water, which when cooled, Evi says, as handling one of them, is ‘a frozen scream’ (p 48)) and devastating war-time fable:

The questions when they come are cold and as precise and self-delighting as a snipers’ party in the woods. All the people I’ve been either scatter or fall. Only the eight-year-old, quick stick-legs, has the skinny wit to stand dead straight, dead still, behind a tree. (p 60)

Not surprisingly, the forest is haunted, these presences more or less closely located in Evi’s sharp child-voice. ‘The real ghosts’, she declares, ‘aren’t the dead [who] are vivid ­– flash-glints off dark water, in whatever tarmac, puddle, culvert, drainage ditch’ but ‘the ones who’ve given up on living, with their lost loves/lands/hopes, mousey-shredded self-respect’ committing ‘a kind of listless treason’ (p 54). But ghost-like presences permeate the landscape nonetheless, summoned in a more lyric voice. They include ‘the young dead who used to meet me in the forest’, who are ‘[g]oing but not going anywhere. When I looked again they were mist, or less, a pearly lustre in the air’ (p. 74), and others blown with wind and rain ‘west out of chill steppe, blowing east again’. These are ‘like us, . . . but grey-faced, bent at the wind’s angle’, and also unalike:

They pass through us and among us, rain through mist . . .  One substance, them, us, water mainly, but how to grasp each other, ours, the language of mist’s eternal afterthought, theirs, the language of the driven rain? (p 39)

Uniting weather, haunting presences (and their languages) is silence. Silence either named explicitly, or produced quietly, with its own kind of resonance, through visual observations, which, through the poet’s precise and careful diction, make the tiny sounds – typically series of short vowels – that make silence apparent. So the ‘young dead’ are both ‘[d]rops quivering on twig tips’ and ‘[s]ilence (which maybe always was what they were saying) newly resonant. . . .’ (p. 74)

One way to describe The Shores of Vaikus as a whole would be to say that it is an investigation not only of silence, but silences – of many different kinds – and the distances between them. Gross has written, interestingly, about his practice as a Quaker, but it seems to me that the silence as ‘listening quietness’ he describes for Friends’ Meetings is relevant to this poetry collection mainly in terms of the close attention he brings to landscape and the stories it holds, rather than a key theme of the book, which for me has to do with how silences nearly / don’t quite meet. They may mingle, like the ghosts described above, as ‘rain through mist’, may even be the same substance (‘water mainly’) but do not (cannot?) melt together.  

An epigraph by the Estonian poet Juhan Viiding, shown beneath the book’s dedication (which is to Gross’s father), speaks to silence as separation, and, movingly, as something protective, as love:

 

In the cage of your heart there is silence

and a thousand-year-old bird

it can speak    however    it loves you

so it never says a word   

 

‘[A]nd yet, ’Gross writes, in a poem on the Occupation Memorial in Tallinn, while ‘nothing, no name, no word, no stone / nor the most sincere treading out of paces, // can stand for the absences,’ there is nonetheless a need for language, an imperative to ‘speak carefully. Aim / for the word, the next one, not / / right, ever. Just a shade less wrong.’ (p. 87).

This could be a description of translation; just as words in one language will never map entirely accurately onto words in another, so with silences, despite, as Gross attests, our felt need for them to connect. And despite the promise of trans-national digital communications for precise matches (an echo of the city’s surveillance systems tracking the poet in ‘A Place Called Vaikus’). Among the last few poems in the book is a sequence of ‘Five Versions of Vaikus’. In the first, based on the forest, a real forest, the poet insists, for which, he says,

 

I could give you day, time,

map location, the coordinates between

 

the chance of a clearing and a cloud

that, passing, sets a shape of light

amongst us,

 

sculptural.

          A Standing Form

of silence. Centuries

 

of rusty spruce-mulch underfoot

and a catch in the wind’s

breath,

 

                     urgent

          as a heart beat

missed. A stillness in which if

 

a single thing falls, one dry needle

or this phenomenal

world,

 

it would be

            (in a way that in this

life we never are) entirely heard. (p 88)

 

The layout of the central section of the poem here, with spaces and (as throughout the book), precisely placed commas marking many small silences and – not inconsequentially – missed heart beats and breaths, prepares a place of silence(s) characterised by the impossibility of precise connection. As if in ‘in this life’ there will always be some small disturbance in the signal, even for the transmission of silence, something or other slightly out of register.

Balanced against this, closing the sequence (and with it the second of the two ‘Translating Silence’ sections of the book) is a poem under the rubric of vaikimine, which is defined on the dedication page as one of the other words for silence in Estonian, ‘in the sense of “holding one’s peace”’. The title of this poem is ‘Learning to speak’, the first line completing the sentence: ‘Estonian – , / beginning with the silence . . . ‘(p 93, ellipses as in original).

This seems contradictory: how is ‘learning to speak’ compatible with ‘holding one’s peace’? But read with the forest version of vaikus /silence quoted above, perhaps the same underlying issue is being addressed. One may be learning to speak a particular language, with its particular histories and material contexts, but silence(s) are intrinsic to whatever we do when we make things with words, perhaps especially, as in Viiding’s poem, words addressed to those we love – hence Gross’s ending to this final poem:

 

But then,

by then, if I am fluent in the silence

 

I might already have got

where language works so hard to go. (p 93)

 

References:

Philip Gross, ‘Sluice Angel’ at https://www.philipgross.co.uk/sample-poems.php#sluice

Philip Gross, ‘The Drowned Book’ at

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=179&issue=2&page=20

Philip Gross, interview: ‘Poet Philip Gross talks to Jonathan Doering about his work and his Quakerism’, The Friend, 13 October 2017, at https://thefriend.org/article/interview-philip-gross