His earlier poetry collections (since 1983) include "The Ice Factory", "Cat's Whisker", "The Son of the Duke of Nowhere", "I.D.", "The Wasting Game" – all collected in "Changes of Address: Poems 1980-98". Of his more recent work, the Poetry Book Society selectors wrote, "At the heart of all of Gross's collections has been his deep enquiry into and fascination with the nature of embodiment and existence – what water is and does in "The Water Table", the role of language, and speech especially, in identity and the self in "Deep Field and Later". Now in "Love Songs of Carbon" Gross tests and feels his amazed way through the mysteries of the multiple manifestations of love and ageing." He has published ten novels for young people, including "Going For Stone", "The Lastling" and "The Storm Garden" (Oxford University Press). He has also written plays, work for radio, a children's opera and most recently (2015) The King In The Car Park, a schools cantata on the death and reburial of Richard III (with composer Benjamin Frank Vaughan). He has collaborated frequently with musicians, painters, dancers and other writers. His poems and writing about poetry appear in a wide range of magazines and journals. His academic writing investigates the creative process, in particular cross-arts work and collaboration, as in "Then Again What Do I Know: reflections on reflection in Creative Writing", his contribution to The Writer in the Academy: Creative Interfrictions, edited by Richard Marggraf Turley (London: English Association / Boydell & Brewer, 2011) 49-70, and "Halfway-to-Whole Things: Ecologies of Writing and Collaboration", in Extending Ecocriticism, edited by Peter Barry (Manchester University Press, 2016)