PHILIP GROSS

CHANGES OF ADDRESS

POEMS 1980-1998

From its opening page – a refugee’s first sight of England – Changes of Address presents a journey through our times, a search for the meaning of ‘home’. With its humour and deep honesty, its vivid storytelling, its sense of history and brilliant observations of the here and now, this book of poems is as rich and multi-layered as a novel.

It brings together for the first time the whole range of Philip Gross’s poetry from the 1980s and 90s – a generous selection from his Bloodaxe, Faber and Peterloo collections along with uncollected poems and work from limited editions and collaborations. Changes of Address shows his development from the prize-winning Ice Factory to the Whitbread-shortlisted Wasting Game, but takes the reader also into previously unknown reaches of Philip Gross territory. It does not cover his later work. He won the T.S. Eliot Prize for his 2009 collection The Water Table.

‘A book of great clarity and concentration, continually themed but always lively and alert in its use of language. Gross takes us from Great Flood to subtly invoked concerns for our watery planet; this is a mature and determined book, dream-like in places, but dealing ultimately with real questions of human existence’ – Simon Armitage, T.S. Eliot Prize judges’ comment on The Water Table

‘The harrowing and beautiful poems in which a father witnesses his daughter’s near-fatal struggle with anorexia… These are elegies for the living, piercing in their clarity and depth of feeling’ – Helen Dunmore on The Wasting Game

COVER PHOTOGRAPH: SALLY MUNDY

CONTENTS

Title Page

1  THE ICE FACTORY (1980–84)

New Words for Home

Stations

Snail Paces

Crab

In Another Part of the Wood…

Night-Offering

The October People

Facing the Sea

Vapourer

Allies

The Displaced Persons Camp

The Victory Dance

A Honeymoon

A Plague of Jellyfish

The Gift

First Encounter

Post Natal

First Day Out

A Report of the Burglary

Beside the Reservoir

The Curator’s Tale

Man and Wife

The Musical Cottage

Nursery Rhymes

A Ringside Seat

The Stadium

Powder Mills

The Ice Factory

2  CAT’S WHISKER (1985–87)

Hearing Voices

Cat’s Whisker

Revelations

Loving Spoonful

Post Marks

1 Snow Scene

2 From the Other Side

3 English as a Foreign Language

The Balance

Baltic Amber

A Breton Dance

Hole in the Ground

Stonepecker

Moore

Apple Gatherers

Little Dancer

Tar Boilers

Here Today

A Cornish Saint

Magic Lantern

The Lookout

Shadow on the Water

From the Fast Train

Tabernacle Yard

The Private Sector

Man and Wife II

The Ghost Trap

Coelacanth

The Clever Children

Son and Heir

Boys Fishing

A Mercy

The Cloud Chamber

Flying Dreams

Charlot’s War

3  GAMES OF CONSEQUENCE

Blank Page, Marginal Notes

Early Warning

FROM

A Game of Consequences

A Few Words for Walt Whitman

What This Hand Did

Threads

FROM

The Air Mines of Mistila

Marked Route

A Passing

Dr Crampfold’s Complaint

Lischka and the Chief of Police

A Perfect Match

Alys, Wife of the Chief of Police

Last Sight of Xencha

The Dancing

FROM

The Case of Thomas Prote

Last Entry

Among the Snake Worshippers of Brazil

A Coffee House in Murrenstrand, 1929

FROM

On Why Books Be An Abomination…

Translated

The Painter of the Lake

In the Foothills of Synaesthesia

House of Paper

4  SON OF THE DUKE OF NOWHERE (1987–91)

Welcome to the Forest

Away From It All

Son of Snotnose

The Duke of Nowhere

Lahti

Saying When

Envoi

A Summit

What the Mountain Saw

Petit Mal

The Dancing Princesses

On the Hoof

Heavy Weather

An Incident on the Line

Dust

The Way We Are

Big Wheel

A Crumb

5  THE END OF THE PIER SHOW

Catch

FROM

A Game of Henge

Frost Fair

Enter a Poet

The Tale of ‘You’ and ‘I’

Wednesday’s Child

Secret Garden

Shift

Grace Notes

The Song of the House

The End of the End of the Pier Show

6  I.D. (1991–94)

Nocturne with Glue

Flit

Late

The Tennis Court in Winter

Beyonders

Cut, Cut

Closed Circuit

Hard Luck Café

Downhometown

Figure in Landscape: China Clay

He Went That Way

FROM

The Wolfboy’s Progress

Static

Digital

Bonfire Night

Bodily Fluids

Night Doubles

FROM

A Day at the Earth-House

Under the Stone

Earthwork

Long Barrow

Silbury Hill

Sarsens

Dating

Crack

Resurrections

The Barber Surgeon’s Song

Ex

Time Out

Guest of the Atlantic

Mermaid, Zennor Church

A Dangerous Age

Mispickel

Rites and Passages

Out There

7  THE WASTING GAME (1994–98)

Visiting Persephone

The Sick Child

The Wasting Game

Ledge

Imago

Trebizond

Tail

Thou’

Nineteenseventysomething

Spirit Level

Nature Studies

1 Fern Charm

2 Foxgloves at Dungeness

3 Dragonfly Tanka

4 Sundew

5 Limpets

Beach Party

A Detail from Bosch

Dry

A Scorcher

Persons Unknown

Postcards, West Bay

A Liminal State

1 Documentary

2 The Bronze Age

3 Liminal

4 Heart Stones

5 International Relations

6 Scorched Earth

7 Forest Brother

8 In the Bar of the Writers’ Union

9 Postsoviet Postmodern

Babble

Kleep

The Language of the Bird People

That Grave, Heptonstall Churchyard

Mock Orange

Sweet Bird

Love and Co

Hungry Ghosts in Happy Eater

Time Lapse

Tact

Underside

Gargangel

Hanging Garden

Fosse Way, Grey Day

Ground Control

Changes of Address

Summerhouse Sauna

About the Author

Copyright

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This selection includes poems from the following collections: Familiars (Peterloo Poets, 1983), The Ice Factory (Faber, 1984), Cat’s Whisker (Faber, 1987), The Air Mines of Mistila (with Sylvia Kantaris, Bloodaxe Books, 1988), The Son of the Duke of Nowhere (Faber, 1991), I.D. (Faber, 1994), and The Wasting Game (Bloodaxe Books, 1998). Some previously uncollected poems have been added to the sections corresponding to those collections.

A Cast of Stones (Digging Deeper Press, 1996) was a collaboration with artists John Eaves and F.J. Kennedy; some of these and other poems in section 5 were written for performance with the group Vanilla Allsorts. Nature Studies was published in a limited edition by Yellow Fox Press in 1995 with illustrations by Ros Cuthbert. A Game of Consequences was a chain-verse-letter initiated by Philip Gross in 1986, involving 25 other poets, and published in full in Envoi.

Other poems not previously published in book form appeared in The Gregory Awards Anthology 1981 & 1982 (Carcanet, 1982), Irish Studies Review, London Magazine, The Orange Dove of Fiji (Hutchinson, 1989), Outposts, PN Review, Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Poetry Review, Poetry Society Newsletter, The Poet’s Voice, Thumbscrew and The Times Literary Supplement.

New Words for Home was published in the Estonian émigré journal Tulimuld in 1983, in Estonian translation by J.K. Gross.

1

THE ICE FACTORY

(1980–84)

New Words for Home

(for Alma Gross 1891–1969, and J.K.Gross, born 1919)

Grey waters, no horizons. Shifting screens

before and after: fog. Belowdecks, machinery

goes on, a guttural ache, and the between-

time lasts, lasts,

                          suddenly delivers me

to wharves, warehouses shading out of grey

like rumours in a foreign language, headlines

on a broadsheet washed out in the rain.

                              §

‘Name?’ At a trestle desk

I’m dealt a form. Such spaces

to be filled. A pen,

lifted, waits. ‘Name?’

Heavy on my tongue here,

it’s a precious coin, our broken

currency.

               ‘That’s all.

Next?’ In the yard

I clutch my patiently-

spelled papers. Here

is who I am.

                              §

Unquiet at my window, dawn. An exodus

of clouds on sheer grey plains.

This country’s thin snow, sparse,

ashen, ticks at the pane.

I try to imagine you, waking: streets

of numb drifts, silence, snow-light

without shadows, the chocked ruts

of grey trucks smothered in the night

which you won’t mention, seeing clear

enough: the future comes like this.

A year on, your first letter, and I peer

beneath the words for clues. ‘We miss

you. Life goes on.’ What clerk in uniform

before me sifted through the gentle dross

for guilt? The words pass…and confirm

my fears, the distances, the loss.

                              §

Strangers, for your family album…She

    conspires a smile; this bright

complete new world is her creation. He

is still her ‘foreign gentleman’, guest

    to this warm sufficiency,

his stiff tact faltering to tenderness

unnerved by their three-day child.

    Here, now, nothing less,

it demands him, such uncompromised

need. The new life. Five years on they’re no

    less strangers. Mother,

would you know your own son now?

                              §

Your grandchild, grown tall

in a temperate land: how easily

he speaks of rights

and wrongs. Such innocence:

a knock on the door at midnight?

Friends, late, from a party. How I envy him,

and fear for him, who can’t imagine why

I jerk awake and scold, from fright.

                              §

No more, now.

One letter missed, one more not answered,

and before I knew

        you had begun

your silence, taking all that was gone

to yourself. So, then, this was the new

world where I’d be… – what were the words?

‘at home’…‘in no time’. Only now. 

Stations

Each country was a station, more or less the same

– clamour in darkness, brilliant shrieks of steam

ballooning into gloomy arches. Everyone was strange,

the fat man huffed and comical, bleating as if in a dream

‘My bags. Where am I?’ Sometimes uniforms would change.

Prague…Vienna…Paris…Europe was a game

they should be winning, surely? Town by town, hotels

grew smaller, hosts smiled less, fewer bells rang.

The plumbing was louder, windows smaller to the sky,

back alleys closer, with sunk yards like dried-up wells

where servants clattered, quarrelled and, mysteriously, sang.

His parents grew difficult, not explaining why

when letters came, she cried, and later cried again

when the letters stopped. He stood at a kiosk jostling

among dissonant voices, jowled sour-smelling men,

for a paper Father glanced at, then threw down (rain

speckling the page, the dark stain slowly blossoming,

blotting faces, ranks of print…) More often then

there were voices raised outside his room, or had he dreamed

that? Father and Mother. Le patron and father. Please,

please…And there was Mother, bending close, her hand

steadying him, or herself: ‘Listen. You must understand.

Now we have nothing…’ And at once, it seemed,

another station: they were struggling trunks (could these

be ‘nothing’?) into battlemented piles. Now to play.

‘Look at me. I’m king…’ He faltered as he saw

hundreds encamped around him, like the tribes of Israel.

Nobody turned. Then a shadow and a roar

of power reined in, steel shrilling on the rail.

The crowd broke round and over him, swept him away.

Snail Paces

As I pry beneath crumbling bricks they come

to light, pale embryos unfolding. Slim

    wands question space,

touch-tentative. They lift small frills

to glide and teeter, balancing their shells

    like the family china. Or brace

on the hawser of themselves; the load stirs

and follows like a shadow. Each shoulders

    his small world like a sack

and strains towards his half-an-inch horizon.

We are less to them than clouds across the sun.

    Beneath the thrush’s block

we find them threshed out, littering the grass,

mute violated husks. Bend closer. Pass

    down empty corridors,

intimate windings, moulded by the sheer

day-in-day-out of flesh. Mother of pearled,

    the inner chamber of the ear.

Crab

Shifty, side-skittling, he’s on the run,

    the Scissor Man,

with his antique weapons, his stage-wrestler’s pose.

And cornered…Cocked, grappling his load

    of menace. Eyes

at the battle slit, glistening. And afraid,

yes, rigid, in his frightful uniform, my tuppenny

    ha’penny samurai…

He squats. Shimmies the quicksand. Melts away.

In Another Part of the Wood…

(Aldermaston)

a world ends, where a swathe of moonlight

silvers a ten-foot wire. The shadow-

cratered heath beyond is bright

as frost. A few slim birches tiptoe

in among cowled pipes, squat tumuli

with concrete cladding,