The Egg of Zero

By Philip Gross

The zero at the heart of these poems is not nothing -not simply absence, forgetting or loss, though there are moving elegies among them. This is a not-quite-definable O that gives surprising edge to life and language round it. Direct, meditative, playful, hyper-alert, Philip Gross's distinctively wide range of tones work together in a subtle, searching collection that addresses both the mind and heart. These poems explore the spaces that can open between buildings in a city street, in the shifting lights of love and ageing, or in the gaps between words. Heady and sobering, unsettling, celebratory, they come home with findings from the real world of the senses, heart and mind. Philip Gross won the T.S. Eliot Prize for his 2009 collection The Water Table.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Mar 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781780370132

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

PHILIP GROSS

THE EGG OF ZERO

The zero at the heart of these poems is not nothing – not simply absence, forgetting or loss, though there are moving elegies among them. This is a not-quite-definable O that gives surprising edge to life and language round it. Direct, meditative, playful, hyper-alert, Philip Gross’s distinctively wide range of tones work together in a subtle, searching collection that addresses both the mind and heart.

These poems explore the spaces that can open between buildings in a city street, in the shifting lights of love and ageing, or in the gaps between words. Heady and sobering, unsettling, celebratory, they come home with findings from the real world of the senses, heart and mind.

Cover photograph by Simon Denison

Philip Gross

THE EGG OF ZERO

Once and for all –

to save dedicating every other poem in this book:

To Zélie

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following publications in which some of these poems first appeared: Agenda, Amsterdam Review, City: Bristol in Poems (Paralalia, 2004), Leviathan Quarterly, London Magazine, Magma, New Welsh Review, Poetry, Poetry London, Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Rattapallax, The North, The Reader, The Rialto and Vallum.

Particular thanks are due to Nicolas McDowall of the Old Stile Press for encouragement and publication, as The Abstract Garden (2006), of my collaboration with engraver Peter Reddick which was the genesis of several poems in this book.

Also to Evie Wyld for a line in ‘Survivors’, to Bridget Thomas for some choice words in ‘The Old Order’, to Judy Kendall for the Japanese in ‘Translated’, and to Jeremy and Mario for their incisive, often opposite, advice.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Having Built the Pleasure Dome

Fire Forms

Translucence

Great Western

Every Last Thing

Well You May Ask

The Assembled

Big Snow

Day One

Plymouth Hoe, with Aunt G.

Thin Houses

The City Between

Mnemonic

The Age We Are

A Chance of Dragons

Sailors

Rock Stump in the Desert

Red Kites Rising

Itch

Seedfall

Out of Town

Still Falling

Lachrymans

Floating World

Chalk Form, with Erosion

Next to Nothing

The Long Walkers

A Prospect of Goole

The Old Order

Mosquito Music

Scenes from the Never Movies

Her Cake, and Eating It

Unburglars

Opera Bouffe

Survivors

A Poppy in Black

Laundry Night

A God’s-Eye-View

The Life of It

The Quakers of Pompeii

Thirty Seconds on the Baltic.

Last Days

Shell Forms

The Abstract Garden

The Channel

Tree Form: Baobab

Translated

One Thing

Still Life with Commas

0

Jizz

About the Author

Copyright

Having Built the Pleasure Dome

And now it’s done

         unmake it,

                  ripping screens and furnishings away.

(Almost too much

         to consider the hand-

                 and eye-work that went in

to all this lumber.)

         Leave the walls and door-

                  and window-sockets bare

for what light will,

         for the small rains and sparrows,

                      and there, dead centre on the floor

(you can’t get round it)

         leave the stone, one plain

                 unwrought jack-naked block (no

labels, not a word

         of explanation) like a tiny mountain

                  that shrinks all the building round it

to perspective, or an empty chest

         turned deftly inside