Review of The Thirteenth Angel by Philip Gross, pub Bloodaxe 2022
curlew
cut from the sky, its long cry
flying on without it
(“Smatter”)
As we see from the above, Mr Gross is still heavily into mortality, as he was in Love Songs of Carbon. But he has also been getting more and more interested in the metaphysical, the things-behind-things, as we saw in Between the Islands. And whatever his other prevailing interests, his fascination with word-patterning remains constant, witness in the above lines the alliteration of “curlew” and “cut” and the internal rhymes of “sky”-“cry”-“fly” and the half-rhyme of “long” and “flying”, all in the space of twelve words.
There are several sequences here, and the sequence form is used not narratively but rather in the way of someone circling an object to see it from all possible angles. Particularly in “Smatter”, this produces a series of cinematic moments, brief but sharp and sometimes throwing up unexpected connections with each other (it seems possible, for instance, that the protagonists of the “Alexandru” and “Alice” sections collide literally and fatally), but often random. At the start of this sequence, I thought it might be a journey-of-life poem, with a man’s life being seen through the metaphor of a road journey. By the end I was sure that either my first thought was quite wrong, or the metaphor had wholly taken over from its subject and become the subject: poem as road movie. The flitting from moment to moment, from human to animal, death to service station to mist to road-noise, is hypnotic; the movement is automatic, almost somnambulistic (except for being so sharply observed and formulated in language) and one feels like the driver who may soon be asleep at the wheel. It becomes, in the end, a meditation on transient existence. In this section we are still recognisably in a car:
A meditation on the moment: visualise
this space in the air, a moment after
your own passing through it, the moment before
the car behind you fills that space precisely,
somebody else’s eyes blink, thinking
this same thought, that moment: here
I am am I am here.
But when, near the end, this thought recurs, it has become dehumanised, abstracted; it is more recognisably Lucretius and the Greek atomists theorising existence:
The road is a verb, as electricity
is all verb, not the individual
atoms, nouns, you/me, our
indecisions, alternating currents
switching to and fro.
Gross’s observation, and his ability to encapsulate it in often unexpected language and imagery, are as sharp as ever. The penthouse that might be
a reach for the sky
or a flight from the ground
(“Nocturne: The Information”).
If I have one quibble about the language use, it is that he could trust his readers a bit more. In “Porcelain”, the idea of the one-time super-continent Pangaea as a piece of broken crockery and the seas between its fragments as kintsugi is a beautiful fancy; I just wish he didn’t feel a need to explain the word kintsugi:
or what decadent
aesthetic shivered it, setting the sea
in the rifts as kintsugi,
as glittering gold.
And in the line from “Smatter”, “as if this was a bardo, a between-life”, I think again he could leave out the explanatory phrase and trust the reader to either know the word or be willing to look it up.
I haven’t yet said much about the angels who haunt this collection. They too seem to be essentially moments, transitory but pointing beyond themselves:
Like a lens. What you see
is not it but through it, world refracted, clarified.
(“A Glassy Thing”)
This makes it all the more interesting that the “thirteenth angel” of the title poem turns out to be “the world itself”. They also seem to be intimations of mortality, of the “nothing” toward which everything mortal is headed.
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
(“A Latter-Day Angel”)
This is a very cerebral, thoughtful collection, though not without moments of humour.