In Praise Of Pylons: Light After Light - Victoria Gatehouse

The title of Victoria Gatehouse's estimable debut collection is apt: light and its propensity for illumination emerges as a catalyst for revelation as much as it is an observable phenomenon.

Leeds-born Gatehouse, a trained clinical researcher, remains as fascinated, and distracted, by the capacity of this phenomenon to institute change in appearance of matter, as she recognises the miraculous power of poetry to transmute emotional intensity from the, often, simple formulation of words.

Light in darkness. Illumination. The fearful, anticipatory excitement of revelation in Joseph Wright's famous painting of 1768, 'An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump', is a paean to the Age of Reason: the darkness of a laboratory's hinterland is centrally illuminated; literally by light, figuratively by scientific discovery.

There is a similar sense of awed anticipation in Gatehouse's poems, and it is frequently characterised by a new way of looking at physical manifestations we mostly regard as commonplaces. Taking what a philosopher might call a 'phenomenological' approach to seeing, Gatehouse conjures brilliant abstractions from an unusually acute perceptiveness, and reminds us that a forensic, preoccupied eye may help bridge the apparent gulf between science and the Arts, in explaining how both examine, illuminate, and encourage inferential thinking.

The resulting poems are unusually persuasive. Bringing an armoury of clever metaphors, and a close attention to formal considerations, to bear on her vision, Gatehouse enables a measured, and to some extent, meditative quietude.

The poem 'Power Cut' opens the eye to the possibility of colour in a way that only extraneous darkness can. Whilst otherwise unnoticed colours 'reassert', the new anachronism of candle-lit, shadowy darkness blurs boundaries and enables spatial renegotiation 'in aureoles of light'. The austere metrical arrangement allows time to pause and to recapitulate.

Elsewhere, the remarkable 'Phosphorescence' is a declaration of retrospective love in the strange, shape-shifting chiaroscuro of a coastal evening, where a kind of transcendent eroticism is found in the light of a moon as 'low and lush as a forbidden fruit'. The steroidal light, here, accentuates and embellishes beauty sufficient to encourage a deep salivatory yearning: 'Tonight // I would gulp down this blooming ocean / for a taste of your skin.'

The narcotic pull of form for form is replicated severally in this fine book: of moth for light in 'The Moth', where the gorgeous filigree delicacy of the creature's instinctive impulses are realised in nine metaphor-rich couplets whose denouement is as catastrophic as it is inevitable - 'this lit-bulb junkie, / wrecking herself on your porch light.'

And also in 'The Geese of Sowerby Bridge' - recalcitrant, badly-behaved, 'impervious to hoots' and now urban by inclination. This poem's relentless humour is pulled up cruelly short in the final lines where the marauding town geese find an ironic mirror to their own magpie-instinct in the collecting of scraps of plastic bags and broken glass to line their nests.

'In Praise of Pylons' celebrates another kind of conjunction. Gatehouse's personification of pylons as lonely stoical titans is an apt, if unusual, device, which underlines the figurative suggestiveness of these 'eyesores'.

Such giant conduits are facilitators of raw power whose potential to mentally 'seduce', if only we recognise it, resides in their fulsome productivity. The connection they make with our sensory receptors approaches existential: Gatehouse's characteristically spare lines are charged with a hidden electricity whose potency endures in humming silence:

'the dying sun
worships the bones of them

and hurricanes can't shake free
the diamonds that make up their core

and if you take
the path beneath the power lines

on a day when the rain offers up
beads on the wire

your hair might lift
as though at the swell of a choir.'

It comes as no surprise, in a poet attracted to the lyricism which inheres to such gargantuan inanimacy, to find a hymn to the often divisive theme of wind turbines.

Inferring 'grace' in the sometimes languid movement of the blades, Gatehouse invests the mechanical 'Turbines' almost with a will and purpose, imagining them 'unyoked, freewheeling / across the moors // reeling in the sky'. The mental leap precipitates a moment of strange birdlike fragility, where the broken 'bones' of both - birds and turbines - become conduits to wish-making.

But there is a real sense of humanity and loss in Gatehouse's poems. 'Blackpool' paints an arrestingly accurate picture of the resort of the past and the present, whose detail precisely disinters a feeling many of us recognise: the seductive arcades 'with their promise of heat and noise / and a jackpot with the next coin'.

The blindsiding of coloured distraction journeys over near-historical terrain and acts as a foil to the ambiguous concluding triplets returning us to the present, where the suggestion of a disposal of human ashes figures also for the preserving and enshrining of memory.

The edges of temporal dislocation cleverly subvert the narrative of the poem 'Pillion', in which a motorcyclist's picking up of a female passenger on the hard shoulder of a bypass is consistently re-enacted, in intimations of both imagination and reality, as though to inscribe the memory of the pillion's death in perpetuity.

The girl, here, is a wraith; her image is recalled in ghostly absentia - 'killed a month ago' but taking her place behind the rider, 'his shadow-self'. Once again, the cumulative effect of telling detail holds the key to the building of foreboding and preparation for the shock of revisitation, as though the memory was locked-in, frighteningly inexorable.

Gatehouse's dissecting blade is key to her poetics. Bringing a surgeon's eye to the kinds of detail that most of us miss, she finds corollary metaphor where most wouldn't look. Her yielding of sensuality from the close observation of velvet-lined mussel shells in an art installation is no less than alchemy, and like many of the poems in this superlative volume, it lingers long in the memory:

'She imagines lovers
scooping out

wine-soaked flesh,
that slow contraction
of spirits in the throat'. (from 'Velvet Shells')


Light After Light is published by Valley Press.