Gross’s attractive intelligence and questing eye are to the fore in his 27th collection, a contender for the TS Eliot prize
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.
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