POETRY
I Spy Pinhole Eye, poems by Philip Gross; photographs by Simon Denison, Cinnamon Press, 80pp, £11.99
Poems which respond to visual art have a long and rich history. Think of Auden’s ‘Musée de Beaux Arts’, or Rilke’s ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’. There are anthologies of such poems, With a Poet’s Eye and Voices in the Gallery for example, both produced in collaboration with the Tate. There is even a name for this kind of writing: ekphrasis. What poets often do is to use paintings, photography or sculpture as a way into the mind of the artist, or as a narrative spur, or as meditation on a particular theme evoked by the artwork. This process depends on some sort of shared understanding between the artist and the poet. The artwork is ‘read’ (ekphrasis means literally to ‘out speak’) and from that original reading, a larger reading grows. But what if the images one is confronted with refuse the kind of shared reading most poems about the visual arts rely on? What if the artwork actively resists the normal activity of ekphrasis? Confronted by Simon Denison’s photographs in this book, by their strange otherworldliness, the mind tries to come up with some meaning or act of interpretation. Firstly one asks what the photographs represent. Most of the photographs in the book are very similar – a slab of concrete with three pieces of steel emerging from it. Even when one finds out that they are in fact the footings of electricity pylons, one is really no closer to answers of intent or meaning. Taken with a pinhole camera, each photo is in fact subtly different. Vivid colours emerge from the interplay of materials, weather and photographic processes: bright greens, reds and purples. In his afterword at the back of the book, Denison speaks about the way in which he wanted to minimise his role as decision- maker in the process. Each pylon footing was photographed from the same distance and Denison never knew what the camera had seen until the negatives were scanned.
In responding to these images, Philip Gross has written poems which don’t so much interpret the photos as use them as stimuli for a series of philosophical meditations. In ‘Via Negativa’, Gross’s approach is one of undoing more familiar poetic strategies of metaphor and association.
This is not say, a surgical boot or a calliper,not a clog or mud-clagged wellie,
not the footgear fitted by the hitman
as he sends you down to stand
bolt upright in the dock silt, rocking
in the current on your concrete
plinth, a Subbuteo man… Need I go on? Believe
me, this is what it says
it is, and if it says nothing,
being only steel and stone, why should we not believe
it, tell me that?
This avoidance of usual poetic moves is key to all Gross’s poems. Some poems try to evoke the very materiality of the photos. ‘Materials’ lists all the things that go into an image: ‘high tensile steel L section and T section girders/flat struts twenty-four two- inch heavy bolt’. Later in the poem ‘time’ is included in the process, then ‘sheep’s wool’ and ‘snail slime’. Later still we have the photographic process itself: ‘wind rain black box photographicpaper God’s/impartialsunlight’.Finally,aftermentionofalaptop,the electricity and the grid itself are implicated: ‘4500 miles of the National Grid/substation powerstation manypylonsmaybethis’.Pickinguponthevarietyofextraordinarycolours in Denison’s images, ‘Paint Chart’ lists
Squid ink tired lavender dust of purple
Half-an-hour-before-dawn ringdove grey
The build up of description is interrupted later by italicised lines which introduce a more philosophical bent, ‘such as by the names we pick and mix we choose’. This questioning of perception and how we shape the world through the act of interpretation is a recurring feature in the poems. In ‘First Footing’ the pylon footing is described as being ‘planted like a colonist’s first step/ashore. The founding father’s.’ This leads Gross on to a consideration of beginnings, moving through imagery of the first-footing on the new year’s doorstep and Crusoe’s never-quite pristine beach to the thought that ‘beginning is where/we wake up to the always- begun.’ Another aspect of perception that the poems explore is the idea of saccades. Gross defines these as ‘rapid tracking movements of the human eye, unnoticed by the brain, between one fixed image and the next.’ From this idea Gross builds up a mythic world where ‘The Chronicles of the Saccadia are written/in the present tense’ and the inhabitants live in a ‘retina-/branding flash-bulb dole of light’.
Gross is a poet who is well known for his playfulness, and this aspect of his work is well deployed in the imaginative strategies of these poems. There is also a formal playfulness here too. Most of the poems are fourteen lines in length. While none are conventional sonnets, they do allude to the form, as Gross comments in his afterword:
‘Are they sonnets? Any fourteen-line poem alludes to the sonnet…and allude is what these do – with the stress on the –lude. They play. How far can we run from the sonnet and still come panting back? They are about the sonnet as they are about photography, or power, or perception, or God.’
Finally I want to suggest that as well as possibly being about ‘photography, or power, or perception, or God’, these are in fact nature poems, but of a new and radical sort. Since the Romantic period, poets have generally responded to Nature as something wild and untamed, a category opposed to but also, in some way, beyond Culture. But Nature as a category isn’t as simple as it used to be. Genetic engineering, climate change, pollution have all changed our ideas of what is Natural and what is Cultural. Where does Nature stop and Culture begin? The photos and the poems in I Spy Pinhole Eye break down the conceptual boundaries between the man-made and the natural. The pylon footings are surrounded by grass, covered in lichen and sheep droppings. Their metal-work is often rusting, the metal oxidising. The poems use imagery of trees, specifically Yggdrasil, the Norse ‘world tree’ in one instance and the pylon as bird roost in another. But as Don McKay, the Canadian poet, suggests in his excellent little book Vis-à-vis: Fieldnotes on Poetry and Wilderness (Gaspereau Press), ‘wilderness’ is not just about endangered spaces or trees, ‘but the capacity of all things to elude the mind’s appropriations.’ It is this way of looking anew at the world, of seeing the wilderness in even our own industrial creations, that marks this book out as something new and exciting.
This is a beautifully produced book. The photos are reproduced in fine detail and colour. Each poem is given ample space to work on the page, often paired up with a relevant image. The shape of the book (17”x17”) echoes the square shape of the photos as well as hinting at the idea of the sonnet as a small square poem.