Poem of month

selected by David Underdown

From Fantasia on a Theme from IKEA

by Philip Gross

We could see ourselves in one, these half-a-rooms
of doll’s-house life style, life-sized (the books on the shelves
in Swedish). We order by numbers; down in catacombs
a forklift whirrs down the racks of available selves.
We follow the way-marked route at a shuffling shunt,
round each turn, like the Ghost Train in a seaside fair –
for miles, then stumble out into … astonishment
to see, after all, it’s just a shed. Take a square
box, corrugated over girders; blue and yellow paint;
a brown-field site, a name … And it has become
a world, born of economies of scale, ground rent,
need and desire: the product of the sum
of (as real and recurrent as mist from the stream
the car park buried) us – the human dream.

This is the playful opening sonnet from a sequence entitled ‘Fantasia on a Theme from IKEA’. It is taken from The Water Table, a collection that won the TS Eliot Prize in 2009. Philip Gross’s poems are linked, at times closely, at others more tangentially, by his observation of scenes around the Severn Estuary. The fantasia consists of a sequence of seven sonnets in traditional form and is described by the poet as ‘seven descants on ground’. The Water Table is published by Bloodaxe Books.