Books Books
Category: Art and Photography, Individual Collections, Non Fiction, Poetry, Poetry and Art
Number of pages: 96
ISBN: 9781781722336
Publication date: March 31, 2015
Price: £12.99
A Fold in the River is the fruit of collaboration between T.S. Eliot prize-winning poet Philip Gross and the visual artist Valerie Coffin Price. Philip Gross once lived on the banks of the River Taff in Wales and his journals are the source for the powerful poems. Valerie Coffin Price revisited the walking route along the river and evolved the beautiful prints and drawings that accompany the poems.
Listen to Philip Gross read his poem, ‘Pour’:
Philip Gross
Born in Cornwall, son of an Estonian wartime refugee, Philip Gross has lived in Plymouth, Bristol and South Wales, where he was Professor of Creative Writing at Glamorgan University (USW). His 27th book of poetry, The Thirteenth Angel (2022), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2022. It follows eleven previous books with Bloodaxe, including Between the Islands (2020), A Bright Acoustic (2017), Love Songs of Carbon (2015), winner of the Roland Mathias Poetry Award and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; Deep Field (2011), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; The Water Table (2009), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2009; and Changes of Address: Poems 1980-1998 (2001), his selection from earlier books including The Ice Factory, Cat’s Whisker, The Son of the Duke of Nowhere, I.D. and The Wasting Game. Since The Air Mines of Mistila (with Sylvia Kantaris, Bloodaxe Books, 1988).
He is a keen collaborator, most recently with artist Valerie Coffin Price on A Fold in the River (Seren, 2015), with poet Lesley Saunders on A Part of the Main (2018), and with Welsh-language bardd Cyril Jones on Troeon/Turnings (Seren, 2021). I Spy Pinhole Eye (Cinnamon Press, 2009), with photographer Simon Denison, won the Wales Book of the Year Award 2010. He received a Cholmondeley Award in 2017.
Philip Gross’s poetry for young people includes Manifold Manor, The All-Nite Café (winner of the Signal Award 1994), Off Road to Everywhere (winner of the CLPE Award 2011) and the poetry-science collection Dark Sky Park (shortlisted for the CLiPPA award 2019).
Valerie Coffin Price
Valerie Coffin Price is a Welsh artist-letterer, whose work responds creatively to the language of poetry and place. She trained at Chelsea School of Art and the City & Guilds Art School in London. Her work has been exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally, recent solo exhibitions including Intimate Cartographies (2011), Distant Voices (2007) and Territories (2003). Her work responding to wild and remote landscapes has taken her as far afield as Russia (1990), Québec (1998, 2002, 2003) and Cambodia (2005), but always comes back to a close and intimate relationship to river and border landscapes in Wales and along the English border.
She collaborated with poet Philip Gross to produce A Fold in the River.
