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.

His first full collection, The Ambulance Box, is forthcoming from Salt in March.

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Related links

› www.andrewphilip.net Andrew's blog
› Salt Publishing
› One of his translations of Rilke

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Books I love

An old favourite

I love the scope, skill  and imagination of Gael Turnbull's Collected Poems. Those of us who knew Gael miss his quiet but brilliant presence.

A new favourite

Window for a Small Blue Child by Gerrie Fellows. A brave, beautiful, profoundly moving book arising out of the author's experience of undergoing IVF treatment.

I recently picked up William Neil's Tales frae the Odyssey o Homer. Stunning and exemplary Scots translation.

A current interest

Christian Bök's Eunoia. This was an unexpected Christmas presents that really hit the mark.

Andrew Philip, March 2009

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Featured poem

The Invention of Zero

What like was it
      this abundant world

where nothing was not—
      no neat ring

shackling us to absence,
      no way not

to count or be counted—
      where everything

filled without this
      empty nest of a number

perched in the mind,
      everything swerved

its wide white oblivion;
      and could we,

given the state of our knowledge,
      live with the lack of it

unable to quantify
      certain populations

in the wild, the exhaustion
      of our reserves,

the number and intensity
      of cries in the night?

Andrew Philip © Salt, 2009