Philip Gross

Of Breath


The angel of breath pays you a visit,
every other second. Don’t look for it outside;
it has already entered you,

your pink and glistening cavities, through
the windpipe, through the branching bronchioles,
as they frill out and spread

then fold back into themselves,
the way the day-long haggling of a rookery
will settle in the high trees for the night.

The nearest you will come to wings,
it comes and goes between you and the air,
bringing back the good tidings

that a body waits for – oxygen
in the lingo of things, in other words,
in rough translation: life.

The angel visits; a voice can shudder awake,
step to the body’s window-ledge
and, briefly, fly.


*


A Latter-Day Angel


To know that one is late
in the day, to feel it slipping away

with the sun, after its brilliant inquisitions
into the matter of things

like next door's ash tree at my window,
with its fresh leaves and its twig-tips withering

with Dieback, read out like a barcode label
on my bedroom wall through the crack in the blinds;

to see the world turned, and time with it,
in God’s hand, but nothing passing –

this is just the shape of Always,
globe-like – and you on it, there in this age,

in the shape of your ageing, turned in a gaze
that sees from every angle, with a glint

on it, here and there, and shadows…
To know this, to know it whole,

might have to be postponed until a later
angel comes. Till then, one has to wait.



*


The Thirteenth Angel


            not so much the uninvited
        at the christening as the one
there are no words for in the language.

            Not even a space in the air.
        Say my name, says the nothing
but day upon day rushes in; the lack seems

            to be filled.  And yet. 
        Try to speak, you taste it, the shock
of animal intimations, something rotting

            in the roadside thicket, bad
        news, the stink that has a sweetness
on its breath; feel the weight of humidity, here

            inside you, like a raincloud
        on the x-ray, on the conscience,
in the small hours, in the margins of the soul.

            In fifty years, too late
        for you, this will all seem so clear;
the thirteenth angel will have written the page

            on which you’re a name
        or less, a hyperlink that clicks
into the mist. Today, though, it’s here, its silence

            like a gift for something raw,
        pink, crying, oh, unreasonably
into being. And the thirteenth angel is the world itself br />


*


Moon, O


true moon, if you love us,
        give us nothing. Blank us. Don’t
disclose a wink of water, not a glitter-speck of ore –
                nothing to raise a twinkle
        in the futures market’s eye. Chaste
goddess (did you have an inkling, all this time, of our
cracked yearnings, how we would madden ourselves,
            how girn in your direction vaguely?)
                stay that way – a glimpse
of pure negation, so not us, not ours, so unwarmed
            to our touch, unstirred by the least
                    wind or whim.
                Don’t let us think, not
        for a moment, we can have you.
Leave those toddler-suited astronauts slack-dangled
                in their old home movies,
            like marionettes in the wardrobe,
a childhood we’d better forget. Leave the tangled
tracks of our million-dollar toys where they crawled
            to a halt amidst the perfect pointlessness
                    of you. O bleachy-
skinned cool mistress, arsenic complexion, dead-
    pan geisha unmoved by our high romance,
                all the shadow-puppetry
                    we made of you, O
        pocked and harrowed cheek, no wonder,
those rough-sleeping nights on the sidewalk of space, O
                    never really mistress,
        tell us to sling our hook, to blast
and fizzle off, remember we’ve got family at home br />


*


from Springtime in Pandemia

4  In the Light of the Times

as when a low sun undercuts the cloud-mass,
startling the house fronts opposite too bright against
its slate-blue-grey, like stage-flats, operatic, slightly shuddering…

            in the light that’s no light we can see,

infra-red that conjures us as heat-ghosts,
the body’s visible unconscious, our pulsing life-warmth
in the under-dark, leaving touch-tracks and smears as we fade….

            in light that’s more like darkness,

like the shrivelling cool gaze of x-rays
staring through the soft and moist, going straight
for the nub of us: tissues recomposing, growth, decay…

            in the light of the facts

in which we ebb and eddy, nodes of data, a digital
balance unknown to ourselves…  So we troop through the sidelines
of plague, old Totentanzers: look, my lords, the merry, dancing bones.


 

    11     Nocturne: The Information
    22     Porcelain
    24     The Follies
    25     Smatter
    38     A Q’ran of Ruzbihan
    39     Black Glass Sonata
    42     Scenes from the Lives of Stone Angels
    44     Disintegration Loops
    46     Moon, O
    47     Sky Space
    49     The Mishnah of the Moment
    51     Psalm: You
    52     Paul Klee: the Later Angels
    55     Ash Plaint in the Key of O
    57     Transient
    58     A Near Distance
    59     The Named Storm
    60     Developing the Negatives
    63     A Shadow on the House
    65     Crack and Warp
    69     If Today…
    70     Springtime in Pandemia
    77     Descants on Dante
    81     Thirteen Angels
    92     Silence Like Rain
 

'Moving from island to island, continent to continent, Between the Islands is concerned with memories, with resonances throughout time, but also with emergent dangers; ecological fears and the rising islands of refuse accumulating in our oceans.' – Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Spring 2020

'The interplay and tension of the tactile and spiritual makes this such an enlightening and rewarding collection, drawing you in with something familiar only to heighten the experience with unacquainted thoughts.' – Glen Wilson, The High Window  [on Between the Islands]

'The two sites of metaphysics – the edge of the self, and the edge of the sensory world – converge in the final sequence of the book, which is also the title poem.' – Seán Hewitt, Poetry Ireland Review [on Between the Islands]

‘For all the book’s concern with the insubstantial and the disparate, at the end we find another way of looking at our presence in the world: the human body-and-soul as a form in which life is caught… A Bright Acoustic is a deeply interesting book, intellectual and playful while at once lyrical and sensitive.’ – Anna Lewis, Wales Arts Review

'A powerful and tender successor to the T.S. Eliot prize-winning The Water Table… The writing is sinewy, urgent and resourceful. This poet is a master of form, deploying his visual and aural patterns for emphasis, as if the page were a musical score… The collection evokes an essence of what it is to be human, the sense of both wonder and estrangement, our place within science, the sheer oddness of who we are. Deep Field is as strong in celebration as in lamentation. With language as its theme, it soars linguistically.' - Michael Symmons Roberts & Moniza Alvi, PBS Bulletin, on Deep Field

‘At the heart of all of Gross's collections has been his deep enquiry into and fascination with the nature of embodiment and existence – what water is and does in The Water Table, the role of language, and speech especially, in identity and the self in Deep Field and Later. Now in Love Songs of Carbon Gross tests and feels his amazed way through the mysteries of the multiple manifestations of love and ageing… Such exactitude of feeling and image is typical of all Gross's work, and no less inventively in this new collection. Characteristic too is his focused, sustained approach across the whole book: Love Songs of Carbon asks to be read as a song-book, to use the terms of its presentation, curated for the reader to turn and return to. From poem to poem, pace and metrics quicken and still and quicken again as the book progresses.’ – John Burnside & Jane Draycott, PBS Bulletin

Philip Gross reads from The Water Table

Philip Gross reads two poems from his T.S. Eliot Prize-winning collection The Water Table, 'Sluice Angel' and 'Atlantis World'. This is an extract from a longer film by Pamela Robertson-Pearce of Philip Gross reading his work included in the DVD-anthology, In Person: World Poets (Bloodaxe Books, 2017). He was filmed at home in Penarth, South Wales, in July 2009.

Philip Gross reads from The Wasting Game

Philip Gross reads his sequence The Wasting Game, his fatherly response to his daughter’s anorexia. Another poem from the same book, ‘Imago’, is included at the end, acting as a kind of postscript. Pamela Robertson-Pearce filmed him reading his poems in July 2009 at his home in Penarth. This part of that film session is included in the DVD-anthology, In Person: World Poets (Bloodaxe Books, 2017). First published in 1998, The Wasting Game is included in Philip Gross’s Changes of Address: Poems 1980-1998 (Bloodaxe Books, 2001).