Mastery is what you would wish for in a 27th collection and it is what you find in Philip Gross’s The Thirteenth Angel, shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize. And as we are counting, it seems worth adding that Gross is a poet who seeks to quantify the unquantifiable. In Psalm: You, he rushes straight in with the question: “who can number the waves on the sea” and, at different moments, marvels at the impossibility of keeping score – a reminder at once of the mystery of things and the scant control we have over our lives. His easy, fluent ways with form contrast with his conflicted subject matter. He has a questing eye and now, more than ever, writes to make sense of the world in its inexplicable multiplicity.
