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.
Springtime in Pandemia brings back 2020 – the beauty of the April weather and the alarm – and includes this lament: “If we could see each other/we could count.” In his opening poem, Nocturne: The Information, Gross turns night watchman to share a wakeful, meticulously unselective view of Finsbury Park, north London, with breeze-block offices, Caribbean takeaways and billboards while, at the same time, ambitiously invoking the invisible (uncountable?) digital landscape of which we are also a part. Midway, he arrestingly describes “our selves as shoal,/as murmuration”, which comes across as a souvenir from another world or from a different sort of poem.
Whenever you encounter his poems about nature, they appear rigorously anti-romantic: lyricism strictly not permitted at the expense of truth. Ash Plaint in the Key of O is a fine and distressing poem balanced between praise and plaint about an ash-tree stricken with die-back. And in its assured companion piece, Moon O, Gross petitions the moon to stay aloof and to defy human attempts to colonise it, describing astronauts as “toddler suited” and “slack-dangled in their own home movies”.
In Developing the Negatives, and elsewhere, Gross gives darkness its due and champions shadows:
“There’s nothing passive about them, shadows.
More energetic than we are, they stretch and flex and shrink.”
Whenever there is light relief, it is judiciously rationed and in the often bleak, sometimes pedestrian and apparently illusion-free world of this poetry, it comes as a surprise and a pleasure that Gross should be consumed by the subject of angels. In Scenes from the Lives of Stone Angels, he wittily releases several angels from stone into story and in Paul Klee: the Later Angels celebrates the artist’s spindly pencilled drawings – his take on the angels less playful than Klee’s.
Angel spotting is, it would seem, a metaphysical sport. And, finally, we meet his 13 unconventional angels collected in an earthbound choir. The first angel is “Of Breath”, reminding us that the movement of the breath is “the nearest you will come to wings”. An angel of the Sublime follows, intriguingly caught up in the domestic, likened to the “twist of steam” after a kettle has come to the boil. And there is a pleasingly barmy moment in which an angel (A Glassy Thing) is pursued past a pound shop. To each, their own angel.
Throughout, Gross’s lack of self-importance is winning: there is an attractive intelligence about the readiness to situate himself (and others) as tiny figures in the landscape. And his final poem, Silence Like Rain, is beautiful – an intense exploration of silence at the edge of a wood that returns us to the uncountable unaccountable: “… silence as particular/in detail and uncountable as the pine needles”. It is all-encompassing: “Silence that is our whole habitation, here-ness, how this water-planet/thinks and breathes and speaks.”
Psalm: You by Philip Gross
who can number the waves on the sea, and
each
wave, say where it began … number likewise the beat
of each heart, my mud-pulse in my cupped hand and the
tremor-tick
in the breast of the greenfinch, found stunned
by the stroke of wrong sky that was our window … the
quickening
too, number that, of the pulse on the scan,
the clump of cells still undecided – to be bird or fish or
mammal …
to number their count till the end (would we wish
to know that, of ourselves or the ones by our side?) … who
tolerate
our counting rhymes, child to child in the dark,
our itch to call a wave a wave, discrete, as if we believed
in a moment when a thing becomes a thing
distinct from the whole ocean, seamlessness which You, if
we can use the word at all, must surely see, or be.
The Thirteenth Angel by Philip Gross is published by Bloodaxe (£12). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
