The Pulse of Us
Philip Gross, The Thirteenth Angel
Bloodaxe Books, 102pp, £12.00, ISBN 9781780376356
reviewed by Amlanjyoti Goswami
A preoccupation with matter attends Philip Gross’ new book of poetry, The Thirteenth Angel. This is in keeping with Gross’ themes and concerns in recent years, where he moves into Lucretian mode, assembling modes of being and matter as poetic thought, like a scientist at work. The Thirteenth Angel moves out of the shadows of his previous books, by placing matter — its presence and absence, and the interplay — as part of larger questions of embodiment, attention and breath. Gross however creates new poetic worlds by allowing digital spheres inside us, as part of a fresh reckoning of human and machine, in bits and bytes of digital pulse.
Early on, in the first sequence ‘Nocturne: The Information’, the poet conveys his intent when he writes:
And somewhere in the middle of the book, he tells us what he is doing:
Two long sequences of poetic reflection stand out. ‘Nocturne’ traces a spellbinding path ‘along the tingling wires of connection’ – the city at night, watched, gazed upon by eyes human and machine. Night is ‘wired and ticking’, outside workday rush, while a train moves above, with ‘the shuttle clack of it, the shuddery whack- whack’ of it. As eyes gaze voyeur-like, even at the neighbour’s twilight TV, from a distance, as surveillance and intelligent networks surround us, it is hard to tell watcher from watched.
Gross departs from some familiar themes of his earlier books – unruly eddying liquid (‘The Water Table’); aphasia and the failing body (‘Deep Field’, ‘Later’); love, entropy and the body (‘Love Songs of Carbon’); sound and space (‘A Bright Acoustic’) – when he confronts the city this time, as a creature of night. Through the nocturnal city, he confronts those ghosts of the unconscious. This is remarkably conveyed in what might be the best lines of the book, where he talks of the city in us, and around us, as an assemblage of meaning, where you can’t tell one from the other. We are the information, and we are matter, even the chaff no one notices when they pass by, in a hurry.
He writes:
Elsewhere, in another sequence on light and shadow called ‘Developing the Negatives’, the dark lines on the white page become stark for their treatment of light and shadow, almost Tanizaki-like, in praise of shadows, where black is light’s ‘dancing partner’, not its enemy; something that gives it ‘definition, edges, shape’. This is familiar yin and yang, but things are not so discrete and demarcated. The haunting lines remind us that night is beautiful, though strange, and darkness is not so alien as it seems, but something that is welcoming, breathing, and sometimes even luring us in, and maybe, taking us out too. Gross’ gaze remains sympathetic, if not microscopic, and the elemental is conveyed in ludic detail. Jane Hirschfield’s poetic subjects come to mind, though Hirshfield appears more certain about what she finds, and does not dwell too long, tantalisingly poised between extremes as Gross does. Miroslav Holub’s laconic spare verse is remembered too, but Gross is interested in the spillage as much as the substance of things, and is hence different.
Other poems dwell on the journey, literal and metaphorical, including passing mentions of unremarkable places (or ‘un-places’) which suddenly fill with meaning and insight once you stop by and pause. The service station, a big buzzard on a fence post ‘like a canny hunch’; wind in the wheat field; broken fragments of porcelain discovered in earth after ages have passed; the mist out of nowhere; the now of things; and the shock of knowing how soon this too shall pass, and even how suddenly, accidents on the road happen, without notice, as the poet mentions prayers for Alexandru and for Alice, unknown and precious. It is because life is so fragile and unpredictable, that we need to ‘attend to them. Your life and those you love hang on this patient servitude’. And through all this, intelligent eyes — perhaps sentient, perhaps machine — peer on. Shadows flicker, as we watch how abstractions of matter, data and time become real — here and now.
A word or two about poetic style. Gross provides no easy certitudes in his journey of discovery, though sometimes a signpost shines in the midnight dark of a highway. In dwelling on science and essence for meaning, like a poet experimenting with the test tube of life, Gross is concerned with what I might call the thingness of things. It is the essence of matter, the heart of being, but Gross is as concerned with the heart of detritus as much as the focal point. That too is a matter of perspective.
Gross casts a fishing line in the wordless dark, waiting for a response, for a word to come. And a word emerges from some submerged depths of language. There are no baits or easy answers, or revelations, even with language. Hence the stop-start-stops, the pauses, to find hidden reckonings, where words stutter into being from nowhere and sometimes stay, and line breaks too come as a kind of answer. Gross is a master of the gap, and uses enjambment the way highway drivers change gears, with jerky shifts of rhythm and meaning. It is not always smooth sailing, even on the page. It is more akin to moving in busy Delhi traffic, where meaning shines suddenly from forgotten street corners, but you need to keep moving, else you will be stuck with what you learnt and that will be all. Gross is not happy with easy answers, they are too easy, and it is language that shows him light, or rather the light of darkness, when all else fails, as it did in the pandemic.
This is a book of its time, in the context of the pandemic, as Gross wryly depicts the change of scene of the virus itself, when he writes:
Who is the 13th angel then? Inspired by Paul Klee, there is a Dantesque sequence in contemporary tone, as ecocide becomes purgatory and various angels (of music, of flow, of inconsistency and emptiness among others) turn up in mock parody. Among them the thirteenth (and the last) angel is one for whom ‘there are no words in the language’, and yet ‘ you taste it’, like silence, as if it is the world itself. This seems more an angel of shadow, part Hamlet, part Dante and even part Quaker and some part Vajrayana tantric, together mixed with the science of matter, with essence and being.
This mystic concoction attempts what Gross is only hinting at — how to bring it together, without language coming in the way. Silence and darkness are inward twins of language and light. Mystery appears more bewitching, endowed with more depth and character. Silence is more amenable to poetry, than the dazzle and glitter of language, the one with flourish, that takes things for granted.
Early on, in the first sequence ‘Nocturne: The Information’, the poet conveys his intent when he writes:
On a tidemark of light, the road beyond
the park, at intervals, the dim stacked
blocks of pixels
that are buses, homebound.
Faces, bits and bytes, in them, reprogrammed
stop by stop.
We are the information.
Bin lorry, police car, bus: their roofs are coded
for the sky to read,
and me, from here.
A live flow diagram. The pulse of us.
And somewhere in the middle of the book, he tells us what he is doing:
So that was the career plan, and modest enough: to be
the curator of the chaff of things, all
the blown-away moments that nobody saw:
the inclination of that grass blade in the wind, the lift
and nearly flare of that was it a bird, no,
a polythene bag whipped up by the slipstream…
Two long sequences of poetic reflection stand out. ‘Nocturne’ traces a spellbinding path ‘along the tingling wires of connection’ – the city at night, watched, gazed upon by eyes human and machine. Night is ‘wired and ticking’, outside workday rush, while a train moves above, with ‘the shuttle clack of it, the shuddery whack- whack’ of it. As eyes gaze voyeur-like, even at the neighbour’s twilight TV, from a distance, as surveillance and intelligent networks surround us, it is hard to tell watcher from watched.
Gross departs from some familiar themes of his earlier books – unruly eddying liquid (‘The Water Table’); aphasia and the failing body (‘Deep Field’, ‘Later’); love, entropy and the body (‘Love Songs of Carbon’); sound and space (‘A Bright Acoustic’) – when he confronts the city this time, as a creature of night. Through the nocturnal city, he confronts those ghosts of the unconscious. This is remarkably conveyed in what might be the best lines of the book, where he talks of the city in us, and around us, as an assemblage of meaning, where you can’t tell one from the other. We are the information, and we are matter, even the chaff no one notices when they pass by, in a hurry.
He writes:
The unconscious of the city isn’t in
its history. No ghosts. That’s our nostalgia
for the always –
slipping of now
from our grip; our faith that somewhere
it still lodges,
any given present;
some ledge of pastness has broken its fall.
Potsherd, cracked pipe,
whatever’s femur
join the same queue in the ever-underground.
Elsewhere, in another sequence on light and shadow called ‘Developing the Negatives’, the dark lines on the white page become stark for their treatment of light and shadow, almost Tanizaki-like, in praise of shadows, where black is light’s ‘dancing partner’, not its enemy; something that gives it ‘definition, edges, shape’. This is familiar yin and yang, but things are not so discrete and demarcated. The haunting lines remind us that night is beautiful, though strange, and darkness is not so alien as it seems, but something that is welcoming, breathing, and sometimes even luring us in, and maybe, taking us out too. Gross’ gaze remains sympathetic, if not microscopic, and the elemental is conveyed in ludic detail. Jane Hirschfield’s poetic subjects come to mind, though Hirshfield appears more certain about what she finds, and does not dwell too long, tantalisingly poised between extremes as Gross does. Miroslav Holub’s laconic spare verse is remembered too, but Gross is interested in the spillage as much as the substance of things, and is hence different.
Other poems dwell on the journey, literal and metaphorical, including passing mentions of unremarkable places (or ‘un-places’) which suddenly fill with meaning and insight once you stop by and pause. The service station, a big buzzard on a fence post ‘like a canny hunch’; wind in the wheat field; broken fragments of porcelain discovered in earth after ages have passed; the mist out of nowhere; the now of things; and the shock of knowing how soon this too shall pass, and even how suddenly, accidents on the road happen, without notice, as the poet mentions prayers for Alexandru and for Alice, unknown and precious. It is because life is so fragile and unpredictable, that we need to ‘attend to them. Your life and those you love hang on this patient servitude’. And through all this, intelligent eyes — perhaps sentient, perhaps machine — peer on. Shadows flicker, as we watch how abstractions of matter, data and time become real — here and now.
A word or two about poetic style. Gross provides no easy certitudes in his journey of discovery, though sometimes a signpost shines in the midnight dark of a highway. In dwelling on science and essence for meaning, like a poet experimenting with the test tube of life, Gross is concerned with what I might call the thingness of things. It is the essence of matter, the heart of being, but Gross is as concerned with the heart of detritus as much as the focal point. That too is a matter of perspective.
Gross casts a fishing line in the wordless dark, waiting for a response, for a word to come. And a word emerges from some submerged depths of language. There are no baits or easy answers, or revelations, even with language. Hence the stop-start-stops, the pauses, to find hidden reckonings, where words stutter into being from nowhere and sometimes stay, and line breaks too come as a kind of answer. Gross is a master of the gap, and uses enjambment the way highway drivers change gears, with jerky shifts of rhythm and meaning. It is not always smooth sailing, even on the page. It is more akin to moving in busy Delhi traffic, where meaning shines suddenly from forgotten street corners, but you need to keep moving, else you will be stuck with what you learnt and that will be all. Gross is not happy with easy answers, they are too easy, and it is language that shows him light, or rather the light of darkness, when all else fails, as it did in the pandemic.
This is a book of its time, in the context of the pandemic, as Gross wryly depicts the change of scene of the virus itself, when he writes:
Even the crisis has an adolescence
when it thinks it can change the world,
when it’s the only story. Then, like all of us,
the years of living with itself…
Who is the 13th angel then? Inspired by Paul Klee, there is a Dantesque sequence in contemporary tone, as ecocide becomes purgatory and various angels (of music, of flow, of inconsistency and emptiness among others) turn up in mock parody. Among them the thirteenth (and the last) angel is one for whom ‘there are no words in the language’, and yet ‘ you taste it’, like silence, as if it is the world itself. This seems more an angel of shadow, part Hamlet, part Dante and even part Quaker and some part Vajrayana tantric, together mixed with the science of matter, with essence and being.
This mystic concoction attempts what Gross is only hinting at — how to bring it together, without language coming in the way. Silence and darkness are inward twins of language and light. Mystery appears more bewitching, endowed with more depth and character. Silence is more amenable to poetry, than the dazzle and glitter of language, the one with flourish, that takes things for granted.