Love Songs of Carbon is Philip Gross’s 18th book of poetry, and is a coming of age – inhabiting the ageing body with a confident, inventive curiosity. At the same time searching, tender, intellectually agile, unexpected and erotic, this is poetry at home with great shifts of perspective, from the outer edge of science to the sensations at our fingertips. These are love poems, both to the person and to the body itself, even as – especially as – it faces entropy and decay.