Love Songs of Carbon

By Philip Gross

Love Songs of Carbon is Philip Gross’s 18th book of poetry, and is a coming of age - inhabiting the ageing body with a confident, inventive curiosity. At the same time searching, tender, intellectually agile, unexpected and erotic, this is poetry at home with great shifts of perspective, from the outer edge of science to the sensations at our fingertips. These are love poems, both to the person and to the body itself, even as - especially as - it faces entropy and decay.Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Sep 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9781780372594

Philip Gross

Born in Cornwall, son of an Estonian wartime refugee, Philip Gross has lived in Plymouth, Bristol, and latterly South Wales, where he was Professor of Creative Writing at Glamorgan University (USW). His 27th collection, The Thirteenth Angel (2022), is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and is shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2022. It follows eleven previous books with Bloodaxe, including Between the Islands (2020), A Bright Acoustic (2017), Love Songs of Carbon (2015), winner of the Roland Mathias Poetry Award and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; Deep Field (2011), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; The Water Table (2009), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2009; and Changes of Address: Poems 1980-1998 (2001), his selection from earlier books including The Ice Factory, Cat’s Whisker, The Son of the Duke of Nowhere, I.D. and The Wasting Game. Since The Air Mines of Mistila (with Sylvia Kantaris, Bloodaxe Books, 1988), he has been a keen collaborator, most recently with artist Valerie Coffin Price on A Fold in the River (2015), with poet Lesley Saunders on A Part of the Main (2018), and with Welsh-language bardd Cyril Jones on Troeon/Turnings (2021). I Spy Pinhole Eye (Cinnamon Press, 2009), with photographer Simon Denison, won the Wales Book of the Year Award 2010. He received a Cholmondeley Award in 2017. Philip Gross's poetry for young people includes Manifold Manor, The All-Nite Café (winner of the Signal Award 1994), Off Road to Everywhere (winner of the CLPE Award 2011) and the poetry-science collection Dark Sky Park (shortlisted for the CLiPPA award 2019).

Book preview

PHILIP GROSS

LOVE SONGS OF CARBON

Poetry Book Society Recommendation

Love Songs of Carbon is Philip Gross’s 18th book of poetry, and is a coming of age – inhabiting the ageing body with a confident, inventive curiosity. At the same time searching, tender, intellectually agile, unexpected and erotic, this is poetry at home with great shifts of perspective, from the outer edge of science to the sensations at our fingertips. These are love poems, both to the person and to the body itself, even as – especially as – it faces entropy and decay.

‘Gross does appear to have come into his own, with fresh wind in his sails… Now in his sixties… he is working at quite a throttle and with a full-throated clarity that sounds, suddenly, like no one else around’ – Conor O’Callaghan, Poetry London.

‘Later is a magnificent extended elegy, formally adventurous, poised between narrative and metaphysics, themes and variation’ – Carol Rumens, Poetry Review.

‘This is a collection which consistently grips, involves and challenges; it confirms Philip Gross as one of our most consistently interesting and skilful poets’ – Tony Brown, New Welsh Review.

Cover art (repeated): Sleep (2011) by Janet Passehl

Cloth, 31 x 23 in. Blanton Museum of Art,

The University of Texas at Austin,

Gift of Laurence Miller, 2015

PHILIP GROSS

Love Songs of Carbon

for Zélie

from beginning to end

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following publications in which some of these poems first appeared: Friends Quarterly, London Magazine, Magma, Manhattan Review, New Welsh Review, Planet, Ploughshares, Poetry and Audience, Poetry London, Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Rabbit Poetry Journal, Raceme, The Arts of Peace, ed. Adrian Blamires & Peter Robinson (Two Rivers Press, 2014), The Bastille, The Book of Love and Loss, ed. June Hall & R.V. Bailey (Belgrave Press, 2014), The Compass, The Friend, The Poet’s Quest for God, ed. Fr Oliver Brennan, Todd Swift & Dominic Bury (Eyewear Publishing, 2015), and The Wolf.

With thanks to Janet Passehl for her work in ironed cloth, Sleep (2011), which was the starting point for Thirteen Ways to Fold the Darkness, and appears on the cover of this book. Also to Carole Burns and Paul Edwards for their project Imagistic in which this took place.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Paul Klee: the late style

This body,

Thirty Feet Under

Mould Music

A Love Song of Carbon

I Remember I Remember

Heartland

Storm Surge

Coming of Age

A Briefer History of Time

Limited Edition

Mattins

Fission

I Am Those Clothes

Pinches

Theses Written on Mud

Epstein’s Adam

In the Small Town

The Rag Well, Madron

The Players

Ways to Play

Hordes

Coprolite

Waits

A Pump in Africa

Towards a General Theory of String

Senex

Fire Balloon Heart

The Shapes They Make

Love in the Scanner

Epithalamium, with Squirrels

The Way It Arrives

Watermark

Small Songs of Carbon

Coming to Slow

A Walk Across a Field

Several Shades of Ellipsis

Blue Dot

Brownian Motion

Whereas

Translucence

Thirteen Ways to Fold the Darkness

About the Author

Copyright

Paul Klee: the late style

1

Came to painting on burlap, not for lack of fine paper or canvas.

See the effort of scraping the paint across that surface. Almost pain.

And the stuttering, crude and approximate edge.

His own skin drying: scleroderma. Paint on that.

2

The opposite of watercolour,

where juice and gravity take