The Water Table
Poetry for all places says Peter Bennet
The Water Table by Philip Gross. Bloodaxe Books. ISBN: 1 85224 852 1. £8.95. Philip Gross has had a distinguished career as a writer and teacher while managing to avoid becoming a household name. He has written fiction, children’s opera, radio plays, horror and science fiction as well as poetry. The Water Table, which has just won the TS Eliot Prize, is his seventh collection, and very good indeed. The first thing to strike me was fluidity of form. There are deftly handled traditional shapes, such as ‘Severn Shore’, in rhyming quatrains, and ‘Fantasia on a Theme from IKEA’, which is a sequence of seven sonnets, but many of the poems seem to writhe and shiver, at times as if impatient with the constrictions of the page. This is highly appropriate given the watery nature of the book’s prevailing locations, never far from the Bristol Channel.
Water in these poems is continually tested by its containing opponents, bridges, sluice gates, ice, earth, rock and silt. In the third and fourth stanzas of ‘Sluice Angel’ the behaviour of the water is visualised with urgent precision rising to exhilaration and relief when the boat clears the sluice:
With a gradual calibrated rip
like a concord of lathes, with a crypt smell,
two green-grey-brown stiffening blades
of water fold in. They curve, feathering
themselves in free fall: wings
flexed, shuddering, not to soar
but to pour themselves down, to earth
the charge, liquid solid as rock
and untouchable, trouncing itself
to a froth, to exhaustion, till with a sigh
the gates can open, and the world,
our world, small craft, come through.
We are left in addition of course with the subliminal image of the immense unfolding of an angel’s wings, conjured up by the title. Gross has described how his first reading of Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland’ made his hair stand on end, an experience that came before rational understanding. There are many poems here capable of causing that enjoyable shock.
There is humour in this poetry too, handled with care and authority. ‘Boffins’ evokes a weighty, ungainly, and ultimately mysterious wartime machine, perhaps now at home on the sea-bed. The first three stanzas deftly set the scene:
Rabbit pasture. A low cove. A hint of a beach
nude bathers might consider,
with a view
of the steelworks three miles off over estuary
water that is still brown even
when it is blue…
and a concrete slipway. That’s where it crawled,
creaked and cranked to the sea,
the machine –
After reflecting on the character of the boffins who constructed it the poem concludes by picturing the machine in its underwater setting with masterly combination of comedy and pathos:
It might be squatting there still – gone native
with crustaceans? waiting on the hour
of Britain’s need?
glum-struck and sulking, rusting to an outline
filled with more and more space
and time to brood
on where their sweet logics would lead us,
those boffins, and how it got out
while the going was good.
How easy the poem makes it for the reader to identify with this machine, to feel for it, and what a strange adventure that is.
Perhaps the most impressive poem in the collection is at a slant to the theme of water. ‘Fantasia on a Theme from IKEA’ is subtitled ‘seven descants on “ground’’’ and travels from the maze-like interior of the store to reflect on the ‘grounds’ of sleep, space, time and folklore, the dark arts, and the condition of our souls. This is a very rich and accessible collection to be relished on the bus or the beach as well as in the university library.
Peter Bennet’s most recent collection, The Glass Swarm, is a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize in 2009.
