Andrew Philip

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Biographical note:  Andrew Philip was born in Aberdeen in 1975 and grew up near Falkirk. He lived in Berlin for a short spell in the 1990s before studying linguistics at Edinburgh University. He has published two poetry pamphlets with HappenStance Press—Tonguefire (2005) and Andrew Philip: A Sampler (2008)—and was chosen as a Scottish Poetry Library “New Voice” in 2006. The Ambulance Box is his first book of poems.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844714919
ISBN:  9781844714919
Author:  Andrew Philip
Title:  The Ambulance Box
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Mar-09
Extent:  80pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  11 mm
Weight:  120 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 12.99
Price:  USD 26.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  The Ambulance Box heralds the arrival of a strong and passionate new voice. Striking a fine balance between thought and feeling, Andrew Philip’s poetry is by turns lyrical, allusive and direct; subtly experimental and unafraid of traditional form. Above all, it is intense, tender, inquisitive writing, alive to the wonder as well as the hurt of the world we inhabit.

At the heart of this book—dedicated to Philip’s first child, who died shortly after birth—is a deeply moving exploration of loss and discovery. In poems of unsentimental and unsettling beauty, The Ambulance Box examines the sudden transformations of grief.

Nonetheless, this is a wide-ranging volume and not without a sense of playfulness. A central sequence of poems, written to accompany an exhibition by award-winning Scottish painter David Martin, recasts John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” as a contemporary journey through faith and doubt, certainty and ambiguity. Environmental concerns are wrapped up in a mathematical meditation or a tribute to the music of Olivier Messiaen. The great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke is claimed for Philip’s home nation in several fine Scots translations, including the stunning “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.”

This is poetry that will draw you back with its music, its mystery and its power.

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Table of contents:
Hebridean Thumbnail 1
Summa
Pedestrian
Triptych
Wandelvakanties Dicht bij Huis
Child of Calmer Waters
Singularity
Hairst Day
The Invention of Zero
Saxifrage
The Ambulance Box
Cardiac
45 Minutes
Wilderness with Two Figures
The Meisure o a Nation
Man with a Dove on his Head
In Answer to the Question
The Image of Gold and the Fiery Furnace
Hebridean Thumbnail 2
Pilgrim Variations
Hebridean Thumbnail 3
Still
Improvisation for the Angel Who Announces the End of Time
Berlin / Berlin / Berlin
Coronach
Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.
Waukrife
To Bake the Bread
Tonguefire Night
Dream Family Holiday
Spanish Dancer
Lullaby
The Road from Emmaus
In Question to the Answers??
Notes to Self
In Praise of Dust
Hebridean Thumbnail 4

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Excerpt from book:  

Pedestrian

Someone was standing in the middle of the road.
She stood astride it, just beyond
the blind spot on a sharp, countryside bend,
so hidden that I nearly ran her over.
At first, she seemed an ordinary figure
— jeans, a fitted t-shirt, long brown hair —
but for the confidence with which she stood
where any car would slam straight into her.
Almost as soon as we jerked to a halt
and I got out the car to remonstrate,
the space around her ruptured
with the opening of wings
as colourful as the flocks of paradise.
She stretched her hand towards me, said
I know you’ll take good care of it and poured
from her palm into mine a sleeping child,
scarcely the size of a nut and sprouting
from its belly a shoot topped off by a tiny leaf.
I tried to ask the obvious questions, but she
folded herself from our vision.
I felt her gift stir slightly, though it slept
as soundly as it does now in my hand.
How can I drive on with this entrusted to me?
I’m rooted here, keeping watch
on the growth of what is planted in my palm —
this difficult, unasked-for joy.

Unpublished endorsement:  The Ambulance Box is a timely reminder of the range and power of the lyric – from philosophical exploration to tender and intimate elegies. This is a powerful debut, and Andrew Philip's is a significant new voice.

Michael Symmons Roberts

Unpublished endorsement:  For the past ten years or so there has been something ominously like a lull in the publishing of Scottish poetry, in terms of new names if not new writing. To be sure, the passing of a great older generation and the bedding in of that very diverse generation who appeared in the nineties had to be processed (then there was the small matter of the Parliament). But our wait had reached the toe-tapping, watch-checking stage, and it's a relief to say it's over. Andrew Philip is part of a significant group of younger poets who have digested both the grandeur and the diversity and are producing their own calm additions to the practice. His work balances English, Scots, tragedy and translation, grim reckonings and light-footed catalogues. There is a redemptive, almost light-drenched cast to his contemplation of the fragility of the human body and the mind's institutions, and the very different constitution of the spirit. This is poetry which achieves its ambitions nimbly and without fuss, disdaining the rhetoric of self-aggrandisement or self-pity. It depicts kenosis as though it were the most direct way for a poem to proceed, and the most necessary goal for anyone, never mind the poet, to achieve. In doing so it talks, quietly but urgently, to us all.

W.N. Herbert

Unpublished endorsement:  Writing in both English and Scots, Andrew Philip produces a poetry of spiritual questing syntax, in which everyday speech and vision are tinged with colours and accents of the extraordinary: it is rare to encounter a voice of this kind in which a burnished clarity of utterance seems the only conceivable response to life experienced as a profound yet daily miracle.

David Kinloch

Unpublished endorsement:  ‘This dove is here for the duration.’ With precision and delicacy, Andrew Philip explores what it means to live by faith in a ruptured world.

Lorraine Marriner