Carrying on where Deep Field left off, Later explores thoughts and feelings springing from Gross’s nonagenarian father’s physical decline, aphasia and death. The experiences behind the poems are poignantly personal. It’s a testament to Gross’s skill and moral sensitivity that he writes about them with tenderness and deep feeling, without ever seeming to breach barriers between the public and the private or to intrude on the reader. More, even as he makes us feel the sadness of so much of what he writes about, the strongest feelings we’re left with, I think, are a heightened sense of the richness of … Continue Reading