The Water Table

Summary

Centered on the Severn Estuary — where fresh water meets salt, and the land is neither fully itself nor fully the sea — this collection explores shifting boundaries of all kinds, from ecology to language to the nature of the self. Gross writes with a scientific precision that never loses its sense of wonder, using the physical behaviour of water as a sustained metaphor for the instability of meaning. The collection was praised for its ability to make the mundane genuinely metaphysical.