Bloodaxe Books (Hexham 2017). Pbk. 94 pages. £9.95.
Philip Gross is a prolific poet, winner both of the prestigious National Poetry Competition and the T.S. Eliot prize, whilst also writing in many other genres. He was born in Cornwall, of Estonian heritage, now lives in Wales and is a Quaker. This background is reflected powerfully in his poetic themes and style.
The reader is immersed in landscape at its most fundamental: in the details of embodiment, the science of life, the nature of time, space and thought. This is poetry both of intellectual agility and delicate tenderness involving all the senses, not in a riot of sensation but in a minimal northern light, inviting exploration of the furthest reaches of what is tangible and accessible. It involves, as an earlier title had it, ‘love songs of carbon’, a celebration of the source and substance of living things and an enquiry into the nature of existence through the play of language – a language which reaches out towards silence.
Gross explores interstices: gaps which are full of significance, be they a small strip of wild wood (a dingle), a rest in music, a hiatus between thoughts or the moment at a concert before the applause. His style, like the music of the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, is crystalline. He uses white space to allow the words to be held or to fall like droplets, often playfully, punningly – even paradoxically, as for instance ‘In/attention. The ripe fruit of it’. As the title ‘bright acoustic’ suggests, the senses are fused, so that sound has the quality of light, and objects the aspects of sound. The globules which make up mist, then, glint ‘not with light/but sound’. All is connected: it is the sounds of hedge sparrows which ‘stitch the world together, space/to matter’, whilst the observing poet is immersed and present only minimally: ‘as if I/were a rumour that’s abroad/but better not believed’.
The sounds of nature are brilliantly evoked: gulls, for instance, ‘These sheer/these curling sound-flakes/gulls slice off the air/like a chef nuancing an onion/so wincingly thin they’re near transparent’ or ‘they’re rigging the air/with cries like hawsers/like high tensile steel/– the great construction project of the moment’. Construction is itself an essential human activity: to make a mark on the environment, to frame it and have something to hold onto in the flux of existence and the entropy of inevitable change and decay, the ‘hardening fact of autumn’, ‘a crescendo/fall’. Gross’s themes and techniques are well represented by the long sequence ‘The Same River: thirteen variations on Heraclitus’.
Gross engages in a dialogue with the philosopher, explorer of flux, whose saying ‘you cannot step into the same river twice’ is known only as a fragment. The poet addresses Heraclitus colloquially and provocatively with the repeated opener ‘The thing is…’ or ‘Now here’s a thing’ in an attempt to hold the flux in a tangible form, even if it is only that form which words can shape in poetry: ‘I’m letting the words flow in spate/in spite of knowing/better, into a frame/that’s made/to look like flux’. This paradox is not merely a writerly conceit but a human need, as a rope dangling in the river is important, for ‘so much depends/on such detail;/we hang/on for dear life to the trust/that some thing really is’.
The existential angst extends to our own identity. In ‘Descaffolding’ Gross describes in fine detail the process of builders ‘dissolving’ the scaffold frame round a building. This becomes a metaphor for entropy, the winding down, of what ‘is no longer there’: the world, ourselves, all that is tangible, ‘that’s/the sum of it, OK? The sum/of us. It is. OK’. We can hear this in different ways but what could seem nihilistic if it were philosophy or science, does not read that way as poetry, for we are ‘written on light’ and the intensity of our brevity may be enough. Gross concludes, for all our flaws, like rare china, we will be ‘held/gently and exactly/Held up to be filled with light’. Without evoking God or eternity explicitly, this poetry is affirming and transcendent because of the clarity and love with which existence has been realised.
Kathryn Southworth is the former Vice Principal of Newman University College, Birmingham. She now lives in London. Her poems have been published in magazines and anthologies and her collection Someone was Here is forthcoming from Indigo Dreams in 2018.