Challenging and tender, these poems are a rite of passage. Philip Grosss much praised previous collection,
explored the loosening connections between the self and language in his refugee fathers old age. This new book goes further, through the failing of the body, through the minds weakening hold on the borderline between the present and the traumas of the past. It follows the journey to the end then beyond, to the tentative byways through which mourning moves. With an instinct for form that both controls and releases depths of feeling, Philip Gross writes poetry that proves it can be trusted with the most raw yet essential things of life. COVER PAINTING
ZENTRUM PAUL KLEE, BERN It is worth pausing over the delicately shifting meanings of the word
, ranging from missed appointments through the cycles of nature to vanished life.
Acknowledgments are due to the editors of the following publications in which some of these poems first appeared:
The Absent Photographer (ed. Katy Giebenhain, photographs Stephanie Gibson, Middle Street, 2009),
The Best British Poetry 2011 and
2013 (ed.
Roddy Lumsden, Salt), Calon, Canto, Creative Writing: New Signals, New Territories (American, British and Canadian Studies, Academic Anglophone Society of Romania), Days of Roses, English, Estonian Literary Magazine, Friends Quarterly, The Guardian, The Ice Road (Tallinn University, 2011), Jubilee Lines (ed. Carol Ann Duffy, Faber, 2012), The Laurel Crown (ed. with photographs, Jemimah Kuhfeld), The London Magazine, Magma, Manhattan Review, New Welsh Review, Planet, Poetry and Audience, Poetry London, Poetry Review, Tokens for the Foundlings (ed. Tony Curtis, Seren, 2011). Birch, His Book appeared as a limited edition broadsheet from Mulfran Press, 2011, with original engraving by Jonathan Gross. Dirac: the Tower owes its existence to Simon Thomas sculpture Small Worlds.
Words for the Shortest Day is printed and its genesis explored in Then Again What Do I Know: reflections on reflection in Creative Writing in The Writer in the Academy: Creative Interfrictions (ed. R. Marggraf Turley, English Association, 2011). The following poems first appeared with personal dedications: Barn Music, for the Resonabilis ensemble, St Donats and Tallinn, 2010; Epiphany Weather, for Petra and Jonathan; Flying Down Wales, for Gillian Clarke; Legacy, for Rosemary and Jonathan; Orrery, for Jonathan, at 30; Spoor, thanks are due to Tsead Bruinja and Alexis Nouss; The Point, for the Ice Road group, Tallinn; The Works, for Katy Giebenhain and Stephanie Gibson; Whit, for Jeremy Hooker. Many poems, of course, for John Karl Gross, d. 2011, and all with thanks to Zlie for a keen eye and love and support.
CONTENTS
The wind bucks but it doesnt refuse us does us no favours either, no more than it would a moderately successful bird. (Swans, calmly rowing, arent unknown at 20,000 feet.) Not dark yet, but the edges of things begin to blur as age will loosen our grip first on names, nouns, days, then on all definition We track down the knobble back spine of a difficult country surly wrinkles in the grey, the sun withheld, till all at once and suddenly every tarn, stream capillary, oxbow and stippling reed-bed, each least bog-seep is gold tooled script, is fire-spill from the smelting furnace. (Swans, calmly rowing, arent unknown at 20,000 feet.) Not dark yet, but the edges of things begin to blur as age will loosen our grip first on names, nouns, days, then on all definition We track down the knobble back spine of a difficult country surly wrinkles in the grey, the sun withheld, till all at once and suddenly every tarn, stream capillary, oxbow and stippling reed-bed, each least bog-seep is gold tooled script, is fire-spill from the smelting furnace.
Or say: we see what the birds see with their thousand miles to fly and steering by the flicker-compass in the genes: the stateless state of water, on the frontier between day and night.
One day, in that year, and so quietly that not the closest of us guessed, the history of Europe changed. I dont mean votes and constitutions, old flags in the attic half a century now tentative petals again, but one day, one night out beyond the houselights, beside one of those fires you would tend, and attend, and chivvy patiently to sleep. (So many leaves, that year, as if they were pouring in on quite another wind.) It may be some recording angel, veiled or given momentary body by a furl of smoke, might have seen the moment when, thin blue letter in hand saying Come, you can come home now, you knew: the place youd dreamed of going back to, with a family, three horses, a path through the fields, was nowhere. What could I doby going, you said later, except seeit was gone? Blue paper crinkling in the fire.
For those struck down, in their six beds as if felled backwards, thunder struck (as you were, aged six, bending to a puddle when a freak of lightning dealt a glancing blow) For Boanerges, sons of thunder, speechless bearers of the word, through whom power coursed and laid them low like kings in state, their boats rigged, flames already curtaining their longship biers For brothers of the awe struck gape, the awful shark-mouth (you amongst them, creatures that must work the sea, or drown) sunk now in some strait between mealtime and myth For the conductors, as of lightning, each a blown fuse in the rolling blackout visible from space across the continent, one outage after another; darkness floods the bulkheads, the compartments of the brain what words? One man (not you) is saying Am I on a course? (Of study? Medication? On sealed orders and a compass bearing?) He says it again.
For those struck down, in their six beds as if felled backwards, thunder struck (as you were, aged six, bending to a puddle when a freak of lightning dealt a glancing blow) For
Boanerges, sons of thunder, speechless bearers of the word, through whom power coursed and laid them low like kings in state, their boats rigged, flames already curtaining their longship biers For brothers of the awe struck gape, the awful shark-mouth (you amongst them, creatures that must work the sea, or drown) sunk now in some strait between mealtime and myth For the conductors, as of lightning, each a blown fuse in the rolling blackout visible from space across the continent, one outage after another; darkness floods the bulkheads, the compartments of the brain what words? One man (not you) is saying Am I on a course? (Of study? Medication? On sealed orders and a compass bearing?) He says it again.
And again and again.
a high-sided bed contains you not entirely: these tubes and wires are a part of you too; that shivery trace, you, on the monitor, the numbers that tot up the oxygen freight in your blood. The shrink-crumpled black reddish bag of one transfusion, another of amber like sap from the pine, not to mention the saline, a clear life-tisane all you, also hospital property: the conduits and nerves of its rhythmical-jittery self. (Bleeps everywhere, continual not-quite-always-false alarms.) I lean in; Im within the gradual devolution of this body, even less sure than you seem (as you scratch, in a vague discontent, half-sleeping, where sticky-pads itch; a mosquito has settled, steel proboscis in a vein; you swat at it) less sure, as I take your hand to stay it, just at what point