The Shores of Vaikus

This is a photograph I took at Käsmu in northern Estonia a few days ago. We went there from Tallinn on the bus (there's just one a day, leaving at 10:20, and one back in the early evening, but it is pretty easy to do and for some reason the driver handed out a small chocolate to every passenger). I wanted to see the erratic boulders which feature on the cover of The Shores of Vaikus, the latest volume of poems by Philip Gross (who I last discussed here fifteen years ago). Indeed it looks like Gross photographed the same view, although Bloodaxe have used poetic licence to reverse the image, so that the smaller boulders on the right feature on the book's back cover. The collection includes a poem 'Erratics' which I read to Mrs. Plinius after we had walked to the end of the promontory. We were here in the middle of the day whereas Gross describes the rocks' pink-bronze granite holding the warmth of evening, and the stillness of the water, its 'bay-wide swell too slight / to notice, almost, but for up-ripples of light...'   

Cover photo by Philip Gross for The Shores of Vaikus 

Glacial erratics seem obviously poetic - wanderers, messages from elsewhere. 'But then,' the poem says, 'all granite is in exile. Imagine the grief of magma, expelled from the Earth's core.' These rocks 'rode / the ice train down / from Finland' to stand waist-deep in the Baltic. They have names - in the photo below I am standing for scale next to Matsukivi, the largest erratic in Käsmu. In the forest 'you become aware of them, like grey beasts, something older than the elk. ... You might, if you've troubled to come so far, consult one.' Gross imagines staying with one till nightfall, until your bones start to hear the stone's voice. It's a lovely idea, but we couldn't linger too long in the woods as we were getting mercilessly bitten by midges. Also, we had a bus to catch, and nightfall in early July doesn't occur in northern Estonia until just before midnight.