Mappa Mundi

By Philip Gross

The medieval Mappa Mundi showed the real world hedged about with wonders. Philip Gross's poems in Mappa Mundi are as vividly observed and sometimes fabulous as the traveller's tales of antiquity. Like those creatures in the margins of old maps they are hybrids of real longings, truth and lies. Each is a journey, open-ended and surprising, giving glimpses of the Middle East, the Pacific North-West, or a Europe of lost spas. There is an encounter with Edward Lear in a Balkan republic of Coromandel, there is snow in the outback, plus some impossible countries that you somehow recognise. These poems explore the spaces that can open between buildings in a city street, in the shifting lights of love and ageing, or in the gaps between words. Heady and sobering, unsettling, celebratory, they come home with findings from the real world of the senses, heart and mind. Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Philip Gross won the T.S. Eliot Prize for his 2009 collection The Water Table.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Mar 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781780370149

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

In the beginning…

…it’s six in the morning

and no one at home. The world

appears, all its things in it,

imprinting your sight with its skyline.

the street with its stray dog, its sheaf

of free newspapers furling off – all there

from the start like Adam’s navel

or a set for a film never made.

Call it Atlantis, call it Lemmingtown:

Bank Holiday, they said, and up and drove

west, west to the end of the known road

and off. Or drank themselves to sleep

together on the stroke of midnight

stepping straight from Auld Lang Syne

into one-apiece afterlives

and look, left the morning like a note

unsigned, and you sweeping the street

and you calling up stairwells, you

walking into anybody’s room

unasked, finding everything there

for the taking, a burglar’s bad dream

because where could you stash it?

It would need a warehouse as big

as the city, precisely, as available

as 6 a.m., as vacant as To Whom

It May Concern. You could wall yourself in

with everybody’s leavings, sole heir,

in a kind of pyramid, a kind of tomb.

Walking the Knife

(for Medea Mahdavi)

She looked out on her childhood garden; a late frost

had turned the leaves to knives. See the crack in the door

with the moon looking in? That’s the knife.

The knife is no news of home on the evening news;

the knife is waiting, and a siren getting nearer in the night.

The knife is a straight street, glinting, sharp with rain;

it narrows towards the horizon; it can cut both ways;

the knife is no toy for a child; the knife-

sharpener looked in from the street as if he knew me

and when I said I had no knife he only smiled.

The knife is an old song that no one can translate now:

we walked three days without water on the plains of the knife:

even the word ‘knife’ might be not be right;

the knife is a letter that hides in the alphabet; dangling,

the phone flex is a species, cunningly disguised, of knife.

A package from the old world, sealed with tacky-tape

might be the knife they’ve sent for you, but how to open it

without the knife? Look, there’s blood on the white

page – just a paper cut, so quick you never felt it;

the most innocent things can be friends of the knife.

The knife is lion-coloured mountains, seen through shivering acacias;

the knife is hunger in the middle of a meal with friends;

the knife is not either… nor or;

the knife won’t take No for an answer… or Yes;

in the wrong town, on the wrong night, the knife is not a metaphor.

My mother’s knife’s handle was inlaid with lapis lazuli,

a clasp in the shape of a swan’s neck; still it was a knife;

the knife is the last word: ‘well?’ And again

we’re walking the knife edge, on towards the tip; if we

can keep our balance that far, we’ll know what to do then.

Amour-en-cage

The first bite is with the eye;

the next, with the name of the thing

     and the price. Such jewels of rare

     fruit, in a Bath-stone booth

on a Regency bridge, one room

you see right through to the drop

     beyond, to spray mist rising

     from the weir, the sound of it

like turbines of an ocean liner.

Step in off the street, my dear,

     to a whiff of quince, the perturbation

     of the door chimes. Touch the crisp

sound of these crumpled Chinese lanterns,

each with a waxy sun inside: Physalis

     or amour-en-cage. Take note

     of those who shop alone,

their brooding on each purchase: winter-

sunset-pink persimmons held to the light

     as if looking for the flaw. Or couples

     (one’s hand on the other’s waist,

a half-resisting moment on the doorstep),

how they pore over sorb-apples, bergamot,

     bullace – him glancing up, struck

     by some delicate matter of fact

like how she lifts a – what, you can’t

make out; the season’s fading – not

     quite to her lips, not quite to touch

     that tender place