The Water Table – Philip Gross’s award winning collection of Poetry – winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize 2009- evokes the landscape of my childhood like nothing I’ve ever read before – the shifting ground, the mud, ‘the megatonneage of it,’ the silt and the channels, and the body of water that lies between one shore and another of the Bristol Channel, that he calls ‘Betweenland.’
It is all here and every picture he paints brings it back to me afresh; the colour, the light, the fluidity and the fragility (which I really wanted to capture in my novel The Sweet Track ) as well as the solid ground and the factories which I watched on another shore. In Designs for the Water Garden water appears as –a mist maze, a rain-gazebo, a water-glass lens, its variety is infinite and here are we flowing side by side as lattices of mostly water.
Philip Gross’s words are beautiful, subtle, elegant, and despite his concerns for our watery planet, his vision is human and optimistic. But what makes his poetry truly great is its wonderful clarity and accessibilty.
You don’t have to know this place to walk with him.
You really make me want to reasd this…
wx
There is something about ‘shifting’ landscapes that inspire me. For me, it is the coast. I think sentient beings and unconscious landscapes are directed by similar forces. Namely, time and pressue. These dynamics effect us in a measure of years, for the natural world, a span of eons. I also think that there is a euphoric quality inherent in shifting and changing landscapes. Don’t we all wish to relinquish at times the boundaries of our beings, give up agency and responsibility to natural forces? And there in lies the fantasy, we need our boundaries, history and ego to exert ourselves and do things, but ah, the sheer hope of escaping these boundaries, and transcending ourselves is such a potent dream.
I’ve never quite thought about it like this before – but yes, I think the potency of such landscapes could well lie in the way they represent a dissolution of our own boundaries and definitely of the burden of our responsibilities. There is also the raw power of nature, the way it prevails and our own insignificance in comparison – it provides a starkly different perspective, the way being in mountains can – I think its why people are drawn to the sea and to walking along the beach. Then there is as you say ‘time’ – the landscape presents us with our historical reference too.
A x
As you say, mountains offer a starkly different perspective.
I wonder, if at least part of the magic of nature, is that in it’s presence, we are less likely to be locked within the boundaries of ourselves. The old fears, pressures, anxieties etc. Nature somehow unlooks that almost compulisve prison. And because it seems to do it so readily the freeing experience can seem magical.
The dynamics of falling in love are no different. It is thought that the euphoria of being in love,
has everything to do with a sense of self abandoning, the ability to transcend the self. Equally, it also seems that creativity is at it’s most potent when we vacate our hard wired sense of identity with it’s habits and patterns.
In love, nature and creativity, we are presented with the opportunity to leave aside everything we cling too that speaks to us of who we are. And yet, in that mode, we inculcate within ourselves something that brings self expression and meaning.
It’s a mystery, I’m addicted to mystery!