{"id":2415,"date":"2021-02-03T14:15:08","date_gmt":"2021-02-03T14:15:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2415"},"modified":"2021-02-03T14:15:53","modified_gmt":"2021-02-03T14:15:53","slug":"philip-gross-between-the-islands-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2415","title":{"rendered":"Philip Gross, Between the Islands – review"},"content":{"rendered":"

The epigraph to Between the Islands<\/em> is a quotation from Guillevic\u2019s Carnac<\/em>, \u2018Nous n\u2019avons de rivage, en v\u00e9rit\u00e9, \/ Ni toi, ni moi\u2019: in John Montague\u2019s translation, \u2018We have no shore, really, \/ Neither you nor I\u2019. This questioning of boundaries is followed by \u2018Edge States\u2019, three poems that seem to find them everywhere:<\/p>\n

Sunlight, late
\n…………………..<\/span>in the year, the edge
\nof winter. Light like stainless steel.
\nJust out of hearing,
\n…………………………..<\/span>the ring
\nof its thin blades fencing with itself.
\nLight like glass
\n…………………….<\/span>that, let fall
\non water growing harder at the edge
\nof freezing,
\n……………….<\/span>could break.<\/p>\n

What makes that opening gripping is how concentrated and precise it is. And how full of edges. It doesn\u2019t just talk about them, it weaves the feeling of edges into its very texture, repeatedly bringing us up short by line breaks and punctuation points. In this way it might seem to oppose the epigraph. On another level, though, it corroborates it. Sudden fractures in the poem\u2019s movement, highlighting shifts of thought, also sharpen awareness of how constantly Gross\u2019s imagination dissolves semantic and sensory boundaries. The brilliance of his metaphors feeds on his gift for synaesthesia, the description or actual experiencing of one sense in terms of another \u2013 conceiving light, for example as making a not-quite-audible sound. Compression is further helped by his alertness to the multiple meanings of words. So \u2018hearing\u2019 and \u2018blades\u2019 bring out the double meanings of \u2018ring\u2019 and \u2018fencing\u2019, making the images of a circular fence (another boundary) and a fencing match shine through each other. And then the ringing sound we\u2019ve imagined consolidates the later image of light as a glass-like solid that could strike hardening ice and shatter.<\/p>\n

This double view of boundaries as at once real and illusory pervades the book. It\u2019s reflected in Gross\u2019s fondness for anthropomorphising metaphors and the attribution of sentience and human feeling to inanimate things:<\/p>\n

A pier is a tease. A come-on
\n………………………<\/span>even when it\u2019s empty.
\nIt would go too far, it is suggesting, if it could.<\/p>\n

How beautifully duplicitous the movement of comparison is there, apparently borrowing human qualities for a playful description of the pier but in the process creating a vivid symbol of human feelings, including the ambivalence of our feelings about moving beyond boundaries. There\u2019s a similar two way movement in \u2018Himself\u2019. On one level, this is a comic riff on Ted Hughes\u2019 \u2018The Bull Moses\u2019, but, as the title suggests, it also plays into the theme I\u2019ve been discussing. Here, what\u2019s described is a bull but the animal is presented in such thoroughly anthropomorphic terms that I\u2019d be hard put to say whether the poem uses human metaphors to describe a bull or the image of a bull to create the impression of a certain kind of aggressively and insecurely self-assertive person. The paradox is that this creature, described as being \u2018still \/ as something that resists \/ comparison\u2019 and \u2018rapt \/ in the fact of himself\u2019 is created almost wholly by comparisons.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s involved is more than just a vivifying descriptive technique. Gross is fascinated by the lack of clear boundaries between the individual being and the forces of nature and society that surround and constitute it. There are glimpses of an almost mystical communion with nature, reminiscent of Wordsworth and Coleridge, though in Gross such moments are hard won, precarious and tentative:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Finally<\/p>\n

it was the least,
\nthe quiet thing, the ice<\/p>\n

that spoke to me.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Here, the poetry moves to the edge of verbal expression, using metaphor to point towards feelings and intuitions beyond analysis.<\/p>\n

Gross\u2019s many-layered poems create complex internal circuits for meditation. It\u2019s typical that the last section of \u2018Three Fevers and a Fret\u2019 should fold together a powerful denunciation of ecological damage with almost metaphysical brooding on the paradoxical way our lives are both part of and alienated from the wider life of the world, here symbolized by the sea, and that it uses the pathetic fallacy \u2013 the attribution of human feelings to inanimate things \u2013 to denounce the pathetic fallacy. But \u2018fold together\u2019 perhaps puts it wrongly. It might be truer to say that Gross suggests that our paradoxical relation to nature is why we damage her as we do. The section begins<\/p>\n

I am sick, sea says. You must listen. Sick
\nof many things, including your pathetic
\nfallacies. That song you thought you heard
\nwasn\u2019t mine … <\/em><\/p>\n

and ends<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Listen. Catch the glitter-swish
\nof shoals switching grey-silver-grey to
\noff. The shiver-to-stillness of the coral
\nbleaching. The slow spreading of the spill
\nto pools of silence. The hundred-mile spool
\nof whale song snapped. I have no words for you.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Between the Islands<\/em> by Philip Gross. Bloodaxe Books Ltd. 80pp.; \u00a310.99<\/p>\n

I would like to thank Patricia Oxley for permission to post this review, which appeared in Acumen 98.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The epigraph to Between the Islands is a quotation from Guillevic\u2019s Carnac, \u2018Nous n\u2019avons de rivage, en v\u00e9rit\u00e9, \/ Ni toi, ni moi\u2019: in John Montague\u2019s translation, \u2018We have no shore, really, \/ Neither you nor I\u2019. This questioning of boundaries is followed by \u2018Edge States\u2019, three poems that seem to find them everywhere: Sunlight, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philip-gross"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2415"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2415"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2415\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2421,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2415\/revisions\/2421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}