Sagitarrius dwarf galaxy Photo: NASA, ESA, The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) and Y Momany (University of Padua)
Deep Field
Stevie Krayer discovers poetry that expresses the inexpressible
The first edition of the latest collection by our Friend Philip Gross sold out so fast that there were no copies left for the book launch and the publishers had to organise a hasty reprinting. What was it about a slim volume of modern poetry that, far from intimidating people, had them queuing for it like the latest Harry Potter?
Powerful compassion
Much of its appeal is that it explores a difficult stage of life experienced by many but not often written about in literature – the gradual falling away of a much-loved parent from human contact, first through deafness, then through stroke and finally through a retreat into some form of second childhood. But it’s the way this exploration is handled that moves us. It could well have induced an uncomfortable sense of intrusion, of betrayal even, as the confusion, incapacity and suffering of an old man are unsparingly exposed. But, miraculously, it doesn’t. Gross marries the calm focus and precision of a surgeon with the grief, resistance and bewilderment of a son who is powerless to help his now helpless father. Add to that the understated compassion of a Quaker and the great poet’s gift of subtly expressing the inexpressible in the simplest of words, not forgetting a generous helping of gallows humour, and it becomes clear why this work has spoken so powerfully to many who may not be in the habit of reading poetry.
Meaning
These qualities are apparent right from the first poem in the book. ‘Scry’ signals that this is a book about words – not least their sheer fascination. The poet cannot resist playing with meaning and etymology like Charlie Chaplin’s Hynkel/Hitler playing with the world in the form of a giant transparent balloon. Yet this is no game – the very first lines, with their elegaic phrasing, speak of bereavement:
In memory of crosswords
that he used to unpick seamlessly
from blankness into words….
Now words are turning back into blankness, and no-one can solve this nightmarish puzzle.
Every irony of John Gross’s predicament is laid bare in the course of the book. The former effortless solver of Ximenes crosswords, a man fluent in five languages, cannot now explain or comprehend, let alone prevent, what is happening to him. John’s heart, which once survived an infarct that might have killed him, now stubbornly continues to beat, keeping him alive long after the meaning of life is gone. The refugee whose resourcefulness once brought him to safety is now sent into a second, metaphorical exile – only this time there is no sanctuary. A new silence, paradoxically and cruelly expressed in meaningless babble, has replaced the willed silence of a haunted survivor. His son could only ever guess at those long-held secrets; now they can never be told:
What did you do in the war,
daddy? What did you do on Thursday?
No simple answer to either
except (if
such point-blank words would come
to save you); What I had to.
Stayed alive.
The wordsmith
As for the poet, what can he do about the silence but write more words? But the supreme irony, for a prize-winning wordsmith, has to be the impossibility of communication with his own father:
Help me! Who looking in
the window now could say
which of us was the one deprived of speech?
Even in the sequence ‘Vocables’, perhaps the most impersonal of these voyages round the significance of speech, Gross’s musings on the nature of ‘Hom. sap. – the vocambulant species’ are constantly brought back to the personal – here is the three-year-old Philip, for instance, struggling with his stammer – terrifyingly ‘throttle-/stoppered by a word’. Later we find ourselves in bed with the poet and his wife, listening to the small groan she makes in her sleep.
Gross has much to say, too, about the physicality of utterance: the lips, the tongue, the larynx (the last wonderfully described as ‘that small flesh orchid, blossom/of translucent gristle’). Above all the breath, the common basis of both life and utterance or, in its other meaning, Spirit: that which breathes life into the dry bones of the letter. Gross echoes Rilke’s speculation about what humanity is for: an inarticulate universe somehow needs us to name things, to be their voices. And by doing so, in some mysterious way we ‘make them whole’.
How to express the lostness of a human who has lost the human gift of naming, and will never get it back? Here, at least, the poet is in his element. He draws on the silence, emptiness and darkness of the cosmos, the ‘deep field’ of the title. Or on the sea – not its beauty, but its featureless, destructive unreliability, its mists and undertows. There are many metaphors from the unpicturesque side of the natural world: the canvas-ripping gale, the rock scrub, the swamp where there is nothing solid underfoot to support your weight. Yet amid the ugliness, there are moments of curious beauty. Paradoxically, something is released by the breakdown of a lifetime’s reticence: ‘…the sentences/unreel/in grand, gestural sweeps, like starlings wheeling…’
Words that sing
Stephen Fry would probably not approve of Philip Gross, who avoids classical poetic forms, metres and rhyme schemes. But these poems are patterned in their own distinctive way, an approach that fits much better with the revelation that communication cannot be taken for granted, that normal service may not be resumed, that we will never know everything. And there is plenty of rhyme – or more typically the self-effacing half-rhyme, an echo rather than the thump of the bolt into the bullseye. Sometimes the rhyme is buried in the middle of a line so that you feel it rather than consciously notice it – see above: ‘unreel/in’ and ‘wheeling’ are linked by ‘sweeps’. Quietly, these poems sing.
Above all there is a lot of space. This perhaps is partly symbolic of the lesions appearing in poor John Gross’s brain. But it’s also characteristic of Philip Gross. Is it his stammer that has taught him to take his time, to pause between phrases, even sometimes at a hyphen? Or is it through Quaker worship that he has learned to wrap words in silence, slowing our onward rush and persuading us to attend – in the sense both of listening and of waiting for illumination?
There is something of the meditative quality of spoken ministry about this writing. And indeed you end the book feeling ministered to: you have heard the truth of the spirit and it is costly, yet it also shows us what love is – or perhaps something even deeper, more fundamental than love:
like a hint
of the tremendous
silent language
we may some day speak
or be?
Deep Field, Philip Gross, Bloodaxe Books. ISBN: 9781852249199. £8.95.