Deep Field

Disgrifiad Cymraeg / Welsh Description

Casgliad o gerddi Philip Gross. Mae dylanwad ei dad - sydd bellach yn ei nawdegau, ac a brofodd realiti rhyfel - i'w weld yn y cerddi hyn.

Disgrifiad Saesneg / English Description

In his nineties Philip Gross's father, a wartime refugee, began to lose his several languages, first to deafness, then profound aphasia. Deeply thought as well as deeply felt, these poems reach into that gulf to find him, through recovery of histories both spoken and unspoken, as well as an excavation of the spoken word itself.

Dosbarthu

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Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review

A paradox of exceptional power, this book explores in subtle, fine-tuned words the experience of aphasia and the very dissolution of a mind. Philip Gross recounts his aging father’s gradual loss of all speech and his own painful, loving, patient efforts to maintain understanding between them. In describing their struggle and his father’s state he ranges across all natural and human history in a work of immense imaginative depth but also of tightly focussed, minute observation. The poet’s father, John Karl Gross, had been a war refugee from Estonia and the jetsam of his former tongues began to wash up when 60 years of English ebbed away. Sometimes distant memories became more vivid and immediate for the loss of ‘words between’. Most tellingly perhaps for anyone who has observed similar deterioration (combining brutal truth and a deft subtlety of line breaks), Gross writes in ‘Philosophy’s come home’: “The first rip / of a stroke in the weft of the neurones / and never again / will it be academic, how to word / that nice distinction between ‘mind’ / and ‘self’ and ‘brain’. In ‘Mule’ he depicts the stubborn persistence of his father’s heart like a mule carrying its helpless master on ‘beyond sense or pity’ in a poem at once visionary and full of sharply defined sensations. In the sequence ‘Vocable’ Gross moves beyond his father’s case to thinking of human speech more generally – baby Jacob’s ‘all vowel’ wanting - his own childhood agony of being choked both literally and figuratively by a stammer – the amazing description of the mechanisms of speech compared to sea creatures - the vowels as sacred breath. Three linked sequences are entitled ‘Something Like the Sea’ and much of his imagery draws on that shifting, mysterious source but 'Deep Field' refers to deep space (the cover features a photo from the Hubble telescope of Ultra Deep Field galaxies) and the title poem brings together the telescope - as a sophisticated expression of human ingenuity and curiosity – and his father as a fisherman ‘at the edge of the deep /dark.’ Every poem gives examples of Gross’s startling, perceptive imagery as he explores the mysteries of selfhood, meaning and the persistence of love. The quality of Philip Gross’s previous collections has been recognised by several notable awards. I would be surprised if this book did not surpass them.