Philip Gross will be reading at the in-person launch of The Shores of Vaikus at the Estonian Embassy in London on Thurs 23 Jan. Online workshop with The Poetry...
thinking back, she sees a blue-black slightly
glowing hulk: that year, another, and the space
between them like dark sky beneath the surface
heaving, clouding when foam flushes over
while on some chilly fragment, as if sat for ever
on the naughty step, or in her impenetrable
own game, the child of her waits; and will
wait for as long as it takes, until the dark gap
between it all narrows again; something stops
this sliding apart of the galaxies, the starlight
thinning, floes like further houses, their late
windows switched out one by one, once recognised
names like bird cries heard from far off, over ice.
*
Erasures
like the dream in which every new
page, in however new-bought-crisp a notebook,
was a jostling concourse of words.
Departures, destinations. He had to greet each
of them, each as itself, before he could begin
the real work: to see them gone –
to start rubbing out one here, then a line
there, then a strip torn, then tatters all over,
to disclose a particular space
with nothing in it but the rise and fall,
the crest, break and eddy, the shape
of particular breath: the timbre of a voice,
hers, his, the print each left in him, that revealed
their absence, or that their absence revealed:
like walking on a thinning shingle spit
to the horizon, with the sea’s hush either side.
*
How He Lay
Today, for the first time, he lay
rather faintly, receiving the weight
of the sun, a not unwelcome burden,
like an extra blanket, like the cat
that someone he loves, loves. He lay
like the old, in skin-to-skin transfusion
with the sunlight, to top up the charge
they can’t hold. He lay as if Copernicus
had not yet spoken; all the spheres
still ground around this axis, audibly. He lay
the way some sun-besotted leisure-
takers lie, to secure a strip of the beach
each the size of a grave plot, to work it
like a medieval peasant, side by side
not looking up through centuries. He lay
like the Middle Ages. He lay with the sound
of the traffic (somewhere there was a rush hour)
or the tide, as if its whisper-depradations
lapped at any summer afternoon, however far
inland, as if the continental shelf itself
was sagging, tipping outmost islands
to the edge…like the edge where he caught
himself thinking, thinking in the body
not the head, that he lived, as he lay,
alongside granny gravity, their two old
bodies snug in their familiar knowing. So
he lay. Then got up. It was half past three.
*
A Kind of Rapture
In that moment, all the pages, every one,
the books, scrolls, parchments, all the screens,
the smallest data-nibble on our mobile phones,
fell blank. They stared back empty at us,
worldwide, all at once, like a new revelation.
As if air had been sucked from our lungs.
For that moment, even before panic or dismay,
we all had that blankness inside. As if the sun
in a casual pulse, in a riptide of particle wind,
had wiped us all. That much we’d half expected
but the books… That was the great betrayal.
Now, amongst us, the great hesitation. For some,
the lost faith. But for others, one by one
like the disciples in the garden, at the gutted
tomb, or footsore on the road, it came to us:
the stories, and the poems, they weren’t gone
but risen; they were all around us, in the air,
the life of things; we would glimpse them again
now and then, not out of this world but in it
where they came from (like us), where
(like us) they would return, and belonged.
*
The Day of the Things
The day came, as it had to, when the things
reclaimed themselves. An empty room,
open-plan, glimpsed from the train,
one table at a slant
as if a shaft of light had placed it… All the years
we’d been drawing them out, into
ourselves, as dreams, goods,
meanings, wants,
reversed. In the backwash, at first, we fell mute:
daily Dave, beside me at his tablet
on the 8:15, stone-motionless,
the screen blank
and his mirror image pixelating, fading in.
Then he was nothing but his headphones.
Children, they went lightly.
By their bunks,
a games console with gravitas, Lego
like Stonehenge, the parents’ panic
from mobile to mobile an on-
vibrate quiver and moan
like wood doves… I could only be glad
for next-door Reg when his Bentley,
waxed bright as a conker,
came into its own.
Doors sighed. Chill atria became cathedrals.
An empty carafe stood amply in
for a whole committee.
But how to decide
now which, was it that Le Creuset tureen
I’d married or that flick of her brush
or her glasses or…everything?
And what could I
be, still here, but the rough-scuffed notebook
I never owned wholly, with this seeping
in, this wilderment of ink,
this tanglewood
of word, root, tendril, from which why
would I wish to emerge, my-
self again and lonely,
even if I could?
Contents List
11 Edge States
14 Erasures
15 Nocturne with a View of the Pier
23 The Age of Electricity
24 Touched
25 A Wave…
28 Shag, Rampant
30 Himself
32 Firepower
34 Pyroglyphs
37 Three Fevers and a Fret
40 Equator
41 Southern Cross
43 The House of Innumerable Things
45 Canberra Rising
48 The Day of the Things
50 The Floes
51 Restoration
54 Bay Laurel
56 A Kind of Rapture
57 Sea Koan
59 How He Lay
60 Flugelhorn on a Pembrokeshire Beach
62 Dear Barber
63 Of the Silence at the Heart of Pyrotechnics
64 Between the Islands
79 Towards a Line from Guillevic
Related Reviews
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'Love Songs of Carbon... combines a kind of ecological serenity with the poet's continuing close-up fascination with physical matter. In it, geological time, the phases of tides, human and non-human life spans, the breakdown and recycling of ships and fruit and memory are all dimensions of the same, present moment. These poems don't challenge us to shift perspective, but to hold all perspectives in mind at once.’ – Kate Bingham, Poetry Review
‘Love Songs of Carbon is remarkable for many reasons, but perhaps most of all for its simplicity. The poems are written as if something has shaken loose, come clear at last to the narrator, and this clarity lends a sharp insightfulness to poems that span the distance between the very personal and the quite literally universal.’ – Ashley Owen, New Welsh Review
