Tom Phillips’ first full-length collection ranges across Eastern Europe and Australia to the more familiar climes of the Home Counties and his own back garden in Bristol. From these various vantage points, unlikely connections emerge: between chance meetings and ‘big history’, family stories and the state we’re in.
“In Tom Phillips’ work, the world is unsettlingly close, whether the poem is set in his home town or at the other end of Europe. Other times, too, are alongside in the present, and echoes of conflict or loss disturb the surfaces of life, which are nonetheless carefully, caringly observed in these intelligent and watchful poems.”
Philip Gross
“The landscape of Tom Phillips’ poetry is an ‘unexpected geography’... [in] which we are reawakened to recognition that meaning amid a world of war and confusion is to be discovered in the unchanging nature of small things.”
Ian Brinton, Carcanet poet
Tom Phillips was born in Buckinghamshire in 1964, and now lives in Bristol. A freelance writer, he has edited Venue magazine and contributed to the Guardian, Contemporary Review and Tribune. His poems have appeared in his pamphlets Burning Omaha (2002) and Reversing into the Cold War (2007), and the anthologies A Mutual Friend: Poems for Charles Dickens (Two Rivers, 2011) and 100 Poets Against the War (2003).