The Thirteenth Angel, by Philip Gross

Author: Philip Gross. Review by Jonathan Wooding.

Philip Gross is not a Quaker mystic, if that’s what you’re thinking when you see the word ‘angel’ in the title of his latest book of poems. He’s not a Quaker ranter, either, I might say – not angry and satirical, which he could have been, what with all the wretched illiberalism and political scamming we’ve seen over the last few years. No. He is, rather, a poet of what we might call ‘unluck’ and hazard (not superstition – I don’t think that’s what the number thirteen means here). So, a poet of the satisfyingly bleak (to speak oxymoronically); a poet who abides in what one of Iris Murdoch’s characters refers to as ‘charmless holiness’ (another oxymoron there).

Do Friends rate poetry? Many, we know, dismiss it as unnecessary – as mere embroidery, as a crime against plain speaking. Irresponsibly apolitical, I could add. Why do we do it? Write poems, I mean. It’s the last thing we should be doing what with this cost-of-living crisis, with environmental catastrophe, with wickedness in high places, and with suffering and injustice everywhere. The last thing. It’s unnecessary. A superfluity. And yet, what does King Lear say? ‘Our basest beggars / Are in the poorest thing superfluous. / Allow not nature more than nature needs, / Man’s life is cheap as beast’s’. Poems – superfluous? Maybe for a ‘beast’ or, maybe, that’s the point.

We avoid (even castigate) strong poets and their poems, let me suggest, as we often avoid our friends. There’s a rigour and discipline in friendship that contradicts our apathy and shame. Friends require us to be our essential selves. And, ‘I’ve got enough friends, thanks,’ we say, when we have to meet someone new, forgetting that friends don’t crowd and belittle us; they augment, and transfigure and, yes, satisfy us (however bleak the circumstances). Towards the end of his life, the poet and physician William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), no stranger to life’s turbulence, reflected on this neglect of poetry:

Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

(from ‘Asphodel, That Greeny Flower’)

So, poetry – it’s going to hurt, as we’ve come to say about the NHS. But like our friends, it’ll do a fair amount of healing too. Give way to Gross’s angels, then – ‘Admit them, admit them’, as D H Lawrence recommends in the chosen epigraph for ‘Thirteen Angels’.

Philip Gross was not granted admission to Quaker faith & practice in the last revision, though you’ll find him in A Speaking Silence: Quaker poets of today, edited by RV Bailey and Stevie Krayer (2013). An early version of the closing poem from The Thirteenth Angel, ‘Silence Like Rain’, was first featured in the Friend (21 May 2020), and must surely be a contender for our new book of discipline. If we’re to have the pieties and protestations of James Nayler (1659), John Greenleaf Whittier (1872), and Waldo Williams (1956), then we should have, too, the wild discipline and dark, imperilled flame of Gross’s great act of self-forgetting and unknowing:

Silence, like rain, falling
on the Quaker meeting, on the congregation
of rooks at the edge of the wood

The poem is an angel of being in itself, soul mate to Quakerism, a psalm to the unnecessary, gratuitous life in which we live and move and have our being:

Silence
that is our whole habitation, here-ness, how this water-planet
thinks and breathes and speaks.

As Gross writes elsewhere in this collection (‘Scenes from the Lives of Stone Angels’), we feel we are in the presence of ‘An everyday / annunciation.’

Gross shies away, more usually, from obviously-religious language and affirmation, and goes his stubborn way among the irregular and unnoticed and neglected and abused: ‘The mutterings of quiet circumstance / under the threshold of attention’ (‘A Near Distance’). In a startling prose-poem, ‘Developing the Negatives’, Gross subverts easy Quaker mutterings about the inner light: ‘(Remember, white is not light-friendly. White rejects light… which is why light comes to us).’ He welcomes darkness: ‘Light is all surface. Soon enough, we tire of it, and begin to long for dark, its inwardness.’ And he welcomes the provisionality and meagreness of metaphor (handwritten), left behind by history’s merciless tide – ‘this beautifully / tooled tangle, blackened weed-script / on the stones’ (‘The Mishnah of the Moment’). Here are the traces of angels’ passing and pausing, like Wim Wenders’ angels in Wings of Desire, heartbroken by humanity’s sufferings, yet longing nonetheless to be bound by mortality and time themselves.

So, what is it with these angels? It occurs to me that the irreligious seem to leave these poor waifs alone when it comes to demolishing the temples of religion. It’s as if we all know, with this nonreferential word ‘angel’, that here the language instinct is operating (legitimately) beyond empirical knowledge, dealing with the incommensurate and the incommensurable; with moments of being, of perception, when evaluation and wonder are as natural as water off a duck’s back. Bring in the word ‘God’, however, and the revelatory and transformative dimensions of language are shouted down: ‘Oh, come off it; God doesn’t exist, in case you haven’t heard!’ So, for the most part, Gross doesn’t walk into that trap. ‘Let’s / not go so far as God’, he writes, as he attends religiously to the benighted city, ‘and the mess of fallen light called here’ (‘Nocturne: The Information’).

The artist Paul Klee (1879-1940) had much to do with angels, and Gross finds a kindred spirit there in ‘Paul Klee: the Later Angels’. He assesses their paltry significance:

Barely more than a sketch,
a scratch mark of a winged thing – disappointing,
you say – a try-out or reject . . . Or could you be wrong –

Perhaps these angels make all the difference. It so happens that the great poet-critic of modernity, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), thought so. He bought his friend Klee’s monoprint of an angel, Angelus Novus (1920), and kept it by him, forever. After Benjamin’s death, Gershom Scholem (1897-1982), friend to the mystical angels, suggested Benjamin felt a mystical identification with Klee’s angel. Benjamin had written: ‘A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating… This is how one pictures the angel of history.’ This might be a working model for Gross as poet, too, it so happens. Benjamin explains: ‘The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.’ But, he continues, a ‘storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.’ Well, the progressive and anti-metaphysical hordes get short shrift from Gross:

By the time the squadrons
of the new times rumbled in,

their team-leaders walked through the streets
and thought them deserted,
sat down, put their feet up in the temples,
filled the space with martial music,
felt obscurely empty,
oh, and couldn’t say why.

Hang on – maybe Gross is a ranter, after all; maybe he is a mystic.

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Comments

“Hang on – maybe Gross is a ranter, after all; maybe he is a mystic.”  Yes, yes!  and that’s what Quakers need to be - at least part of the time.  A bas reason & Enlightenment; long live anarchy and Spirit!  Thank you, Jonathan!  Must get Philip Gross.

By joanna.dales on 1st May 2023 - 17:14

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