Later

By Philip Gross

Challenging and tender, these poems are a rite of passage. Philip Gross's much praised previous collection, Deep Field, explored the loosening connections between the self and language in his refugee father's old age. This new book goes further, through the failing of the body, through the mind's weakening hold on the borderline between the present and the traumas of the past. It follows the journey to the end… then beyond, to the tentative byways through which mourning moves. With an instinct for form that both controls and releases depths of feeling, Philip Gross writes poetry that proves it can be trusted with the most raw yet essential things of life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Mar 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781780370798

Philip Gross

Born in Cornwall, son of an Estonian wartime refugee, Philip Gross has lived in Plymouth, Bristol, and latterly South Wales, where he was Professor of Creative Writing at Glamorgan University (USW). His 27th collection, The Thirteenth Angel (2022), is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and is shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2022. It follows eleven previous books with Bloodaxe, including Between the Islands (2020), A Bright Acoustic (2017), Love Songs of Carbon (2015), winner of the Roland Mathias Poetry Award and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; Deep Field (2011), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; The Water Table (2009), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2009; and Changes of Address: Poems 1980-1998 (2001), his selection from earlier books including The Ice Factory, Cat’s Whisker, The Son of the Duke of Nowhere, I.D. and The Wasting Game. Since The Air Mines of Mistila (with Sylvia Kantaris, Bloodaxe Books, 1988), he has been a keen collaborator, most recently with artist Valerie Coffin Price on A Fold in the River (2015), with poet Lesley Saunders on A Part of the Main (2018), and with Welsh-language bardd Cyril Jones on Troeon/Turnings (2021). I Spy Pinhole Eye (Cinnamon Press, 2009), with photographer Simon Denison, won the Wales Book of the Year Award 2010. He received a Cholmondeley Award in 2017. Philip Gross's poetry for young people includes Manifold Manor, The All-Nite Café (winner of the Signal Award 1994), Off Road to Everywhere (winner of the CLPE Award 2011) and the poetry-science collection Dark Sky Park (shortlisted for the CLiPPA award 2019).

Book preview

Flying Down Wales

The wind bucks

but it doesn’t refuse us

– does us no favours either,

no more than it would a moderately

                                     successful bird.

The land, though, gives little away

from bird height.

(Swans, calmly rowing,

aren’t unknown at 20,000 feet.)

Not dark yet, but the edges of things

                                    begin to blur

as age will loosen our grip first on names,

nouns, days,

then on all definition…

We track down the knobble-

back spine of a difficult country –

                                     surly wrinkles

in the grey, the sun withheld, till all at once

and suddenly

every tarn, stream-

capillary, oxbow and stippling

reed-bed, each least bog-seep is gold-

                                    tooled script,

is fire-spill from the smelting furnace. Or

say: we see

what the birds see

with their thousand miles to fly

and steering by the flicker-compass

                                   in the genes: the stateless

state of water, on the frontier between day and night.

Home, 1990

One day, in that year, and so quietly

that not the closest of us guessed,

             the history of Europe changed.

I don’t mean votes and constitutions,

old flags in the attic half a century

             now tentative petals again,

but one day, one night out beyond

the houselights, beside one of those fires

             you would tend, and attend,

and chivvy patiently to sleep. (So many

leaves, that year, as if they were pouring in

             on quite another wind.)

It may be some recording angel, veiled

or given momentary body by a furl

             of smoke, might have seen

the moment when, thin blue letter in hand

saying Come, you can come home now,

             you knew: the place you’d dreamed

of going back to, with a family,

three horses, a path through the fields,

             was nowhere. What could I do

by going, you said later, except see

it was gone? Blue paper crinkling in the fire.

             Estonia was safe, here, inside you.

Stroke Ward

For those struck

down, in their six beds

as if felled backwards,