A River Runs Through

The crowd gathers the rain The crowd gathers Inside the rain The sky is green Greener than a Gardener’s dream The grass is green Together they sing¹

It’s quite easy to sound banal when talking about the relation of water to human beings. It’s also quite an easy trope to send up, as I think Kevin Barnes is doing in the quotation above, throwing ‘crowd’ and ‘rain’ together in any way the grammar will let him, and combining them with nonsensical hyperbole to the net effect of nebulously associating rain with the large number of people on whom it falls. Water has a prehistoric and all but unfathomable relation to life in general, and perhaps this accounts for the ease with which one can slip into mundane generalisations when trying to speak about it. However, this relation also creates a field of great fertility for the skilled poet. It would therefore probably be wrong to set up a straw man who claims that everything that can be written about water has already been written, in light of Alice Oswald’s Dart, which also won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002, and then argue for the surprising originality of Gross’s collection. Instead, I would suggest that it is entirely unsurprising that another collection of poems about water is resonant, powerful, and innovative.

Gross uses the printed word on the page as a supple and unforced medium through which to channel the mysteries of water: ‘Meander’ does indeed meander across the page, but the effect is something beyond the pictorial: its curves comfortably contain digressions which seem to add to the air of quiet inevitability that the poem has in common with a river. The lines are short, but rarely sound so:

    such gentle rigour   with raggy pink balsam at its edges, gasholders beyond and the plosh of a rat shape     into water eddying away also part of the argument:

(p. 53)

The meandering of words has a peculiar effect on the reader; glancing at the poem, one is struck by the way in which it looks like a meandering river, but when reading it aloud, the irregularity with which the lines are indented forces a pause of consideration not at the line’s end (as we might encounter in heroic couplets, for example), but at its beginning. Occasionally the pause will be negligible, as the reader finds the line begins at the margin; towards the end of the poem ‘later’, which forms a whole line, is indented by about half the average line length of the poem. The effect is to give each line a kind of focus bordering on independence, without detracting from its function as a constituent part of a whole. The lines feel full not because of words or stresses, but because each one, through the constant unsteadying of the reader, is subject to the ‘gentle rigour’ Gross describes the river as having. The ‘argument’, in this way, reaches back to its near-obsolete sense of being the subject or topic of a discourse (the river’s flow, in this case), and perhaps as far back as the proto-Indo-European root *arg-, meaning to be bright or clear, and also the probable root of the French for silver – the closest one might get to ascribing a painterly colour to the river.

The closing four lines,

we shall return to this,     later,   no hurry, but we shall return.

(p. 53)

have the magisterial inhumanity we imagine T. S. Eliot’s river-god in The Dry Salvages might have, were it able to speak. The three blunt monosyllables that describe it are seemingly all-encompassing:

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god – sullen, untamed, and intractable, Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier; Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce; Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.²

Eliot’s lines seem comparatively packed, as well they might be...