sheenaghpugh | Review of Love Songs of Carbon by Philip Gross, pub. Bloodaxe 2015

Eustache Deschamps, in a 15th-century ballade, noted forensically the effect old age was having on his body and mind: not just his yellowing teeth and failing tastebuds but his impatience with youth and intolerance of change, and observed gloomily "Ce sont les signes de la mort".

Love Songs of Carbon is a whole collection on the theme of ageing; if it does not echo Deschamps' mordant gloom, that is because Gross, now in his sixties, has a writing voice rather like that of the late Edwin Morgan, dominated by intellectual curiosity and irrepressible playfulness, and therefore sounding far younger than his physical age. What terrifies and disgusts Deschamps intrigues Gross; you can sense him not recoiling from his subject matter, but wanting to poke into the whys and wherefores of it, as in "Mould Music", where it is not too much to say that he delights in the insidious beauty of decay:

the ghostly blue-grey

of the lustre on the plum skin
is developing its imprint

of the after-life.

As for playfulness, nothing ages a person faster than forgetting how to play, and in this respect Gross has always been careful in his work to avoid the trap of "growing up" or "acting his age". There is no word or idea with which he will not play, and here this principle extends from not-so-casual verbal games like substituting "drink about it" for "think about it" (in "A Briefer History of Time"), through the thought-provoking pun in "Theses Written on Mud":

That Thesis and Antithesis were a marriage made in Heaven, or in Hegel. Ask their only child, Syn

to the disturbing notion he plays with in "Mattins", that centuries of valuing the soul over the body might be mistaken; that the "rusty", stiff body shuffling toward the bathroom at three in the morning might be more cherished by its creator than by its owner. This poem about an ageing body positively (and ironically) glitters with the verbal subtleties of an agile mind, witness the multitude of meanings he gets into the single word "passing", and the wordplay in the body's moving "through the cloisters of itself/to its offices", where "offices" hints beyond "set times of prayer" to "house of office".

The word "play", in fact, dominates the collection; there are even poems called "Players" and "Ways to Play". "Towards a General Theory of String" is the pure play of a theorist, ricocheting between science and metaphor, and indeed Gross's intellectual curiosity extends into fields where many poets don't go. There is vocabulary, every so often, that will send most non-scientists to a reference book to learn something new – I'd had no idea, before this, that Brownian motion was a genuine scientific term, not just something Douglas Adams invented in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Of course, all this playfulness has a darker side; with such a theme it would be odd if it did not. "Senex" (not a reference to Betjeman's poem of that name; they are as unlike as they could be) is as forensic in its observation of ageing as Deschamps:

crisp, tetchy, liable to flare
- no time for smoulder, […]

bones honeycombed, half air,
lightness that could blow away

(and will)

And behind ageing is mortality: in the innocently-titled "A Walk Across A Field", a couple unsure of their footing on frozen grass are uncomfortably aware of how this is "like any pavement/for the very old". Back at their car, the narrator observes, in a phrase reminiscent of the Falklands war reporter's "I counted them all out and I counted them all back",

I count us in
- me, you.

This poem, and others like "A Love Song of Carbon", revolve around awareness that all human relationships and activities end the same way. Yet the collection's tone remains positive, insisting on seeing it as "a kind of victory […] To be/here. So very here. So very small" ("Storm Surge"). And the opening poem, "Paul Klee: the late style" ends with an exhortation:

be

the drum skin
beating till it rips

still beating (don't say beaten) even then.

Again this is a mite reminiscent of the defiant ending of Edwin Morgan's late collection, Cathures. He, however, was then in his eighties and consciously saying farewell. Philip Gross, happily, is but a lad in his early sixties and his 'satiable curtiosity should be delighting us for a long time yet.