Review of Between the Islands by Philip Gross, pub. Bloodaxe 2020

              We’re on the edge
 more often than we think

Piers, shores, gangplanks, a temporary road over an iced-up sea, a land bridge drowned in a tsunami. All very liminal, and behind all these edges, a consciousness of the threshold between the living and the dead.
The sea which dominates this collection is literal as well as metaphorical: at the end of “Three Fevers and a Fret” it speaks, angrily, of what is being done to it:

                Listen. Catch the glitter-swish
      of shoals switching grey-silver-grey to
     off. The shiver-to-stillness of the coral
     bleaching. The slow spreading of the spill
     to pools of silence.  The hundred-mile spool
     of whale song snapped. I have no words for you.

The inspired line break that throws such a weight on the word “off” in that quote reminds us that Gross is a poet to whom the niceties of technique are important. The title poem is a sequence of fifteen variant sonnets. It isn’t a crown of sonnets, but the last, elongated, line of each is broken in the middle and the first rhyme of each picks up on the last word before the break in the last. Thus, for instance, no. 9 ends

 over water. Are you ready… Can you hear
     me. This, slowly, in stuttering Morse. The pause
                                   before Yes. Loud and clear.

while no 10 begins

     The edge of things. Grey swell, imploding, draws
     curtains of spray.


Those punning drawn curtains remind us further that Gross, even when writing of the most serious subjects, is by nature linguistically playful and fortunately never tries to suppress this.  His wry epitaph for Brighton’s West Pier (Nocturne with a View of the Pier) is both gently humorous and oddly moving, as humour can often be.

     Always the other one, the lesser, West Pier Minor….
     The one famous thing he did was to burn.
     To stand up in a body of smoke. Then we turned.

     We still talk about him, sporting his new uniform of flame.

Nevertheless, this is at root a meditative collection, haunted and haunting. It often sounds edgily relevant and contemporary – the Somerset Levels, “chafed by long drainage”, waiting “for the sea to return, to be healed”. This is a surely intentional reference to the flooding of recent years, but the uncanny contemporary relevance of “the kingdom of Quarantine” –fever-struck ships seeing “the docks/they can’t reach” – must be serendipitous, the result not of trying to be au fait with the latest news but of addressing universal concerns that keep cropping up in new forms, like the “same-and-changing sea shapes”. His list of rocky islets in the Scillies:

     Hanjague, Menavaur,
     Ganninick, Crebawathan, Rosevean, Gorregan,
     Mincarlo

is reminiscent of the shipping forecast, that litany so often compared to a prayer. This collection takes a lot of reading; like its central image it is slippery, many-faceted and yields more each time you go back to it.