Philip Gross is the author, most recently, of a volume of poetry, The Son of the Duke of No-where, and of a novel for young people, The Song of Gail and Fludd.
Gusting across, not waiting
for the lights, just one more loose end of the working day
leaking home through the cracks in the traffic, at six
already dark ... Across, between a humped WIMPY-jacketed back
hugging two carrier-bags from the off-licence,
and a shock mascara’d teenage mum gone grey
in my headlights (her buggy-bound astronaut
bumping down to the breath of exhaust on his...
Whole systems of thought have been founded on the French language’s inability to distinguish differing from deferring. Perhaps Napoleon is to blame (‘Not tonight, Josephine’)....
August is the cruellest month, breeding tailbacks on the Dover Road and logjams in every departure lounge. Travel reverts to travail, stirring dull roots in trepalium – that classical...
Johnson’s Imlac, urging that the poet neglect the ‘minuter discriminations’ of the tulip leaf in favour of ‘general properties’, has been unpopular for two hundred...
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