Clouding, Clearing, Shining : Dynamo By Luke Samuel Yates

In Luke Samuel Yates’ postmodern landscape, cities have many roundabouts that lead nowhere. Like Andover and Milton Keynes, they carry the suspicion of directional options, but a destination that is mostly a starting point:

‘I often feel that I’m coming up
to that roundabout. I’ve got choices.
I can come off onto the same road
or keep going round.’ (‘The third way’)

The process of travel is pyrrhic: ‘Birmingham New Street has ten different exits /and all of them go to Birmingham’. Yates’ way of seeing is an admission that nothing is making sense, an open-eyed, and strangely brilliant examination of the zeitgeist as if viewed by a child, or from another planet. But the naivety is faux, the means by which to open up a new, fragmented front on an insanely and pointlessly velocitous urban world that has abandoned its urbanity, and lost its own sense of direction.

Perhaps it is significant that the poet is also a lecturer in Sociology: the atomization of his vision lends itself to overview, to beetling observations of metropolises animated by frenetic activity and fuelled on Skinny Lattes. Finding it impossible to escape (cf. Hotel California: ‘You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave’), the work of socialization hardens the drone’s exterior. Pitching a ‘new build’ into the architectural cavity vacated by the ‘old build’, the planners and corporate bosses rotate the ingress with the insouciant dynamism of indifference:

‘Yet before long, people
with briefcases and coffees
would mill purposefully
around revolving doors.
They didn’t look much like us,
or that they’d like us much.’ (‘They were building something’)

The buzzing and ferreting about, the forensic dissection of a teeming city from above, gives evidence of only one lens of what Thomas Hardy called a ‘multiplying eye’. When Yates homes in on the terrain of the individual, he approaches it directly and without judgment: finding unreason and absurdity, he observes, yet conveys a kind of truth amongst the self-destructive lunacy of open-mawed consumerism. Set on a continuum, the denizens of this world are heading towards torpid inertia, and it doesn’t fall within the poet’s remit to halt the decline or to offer consolation. But he is compelled to look.

And finds, amongst many others, ‘Bobby’, who has ‘had a problem eating vegetables and fruit’ since the age of twelve, and who faces premature bowel decrepitude. Yates’ final lines hint at helpless insight, buried in the grey blandishments of ‘baby food’:

‘Broccoli is my Everest, she said,
laughing, ashamed.’ (‘Finding Bobby’)

The style and tone, here, typify Yates’ approach throughout the collection: a directness of engagement that might be described as innocent or unworldly, the better, maybe, to reveal the ridiculous extremities of an overheated and dangerously contemporary landscape. This poet’s great skill is to draw the tableaux straight-faced and with extreme simplicity. Opening windows on a world we recognise as authentic, he points up the ritualised mundanity in which he, and all of us, participate, and invests it with a solitary sadness:

‘I drive to the office in my Peugeot in the rain,
in the sun. I eat from a tupperware
looking at my inbox.’ (‘They’re quite famous, apparently’)

The window is a revelation, an ‘advent calendar box’ behind which a fascinating quotidian takes place where ‘one sat peering solemnly at a screen / under a parabola of bunting’, whilst another, reminiscent of Larkin’s ‘thin clerk’, exercises ‘in an upstairs window / with a set of weights, a mirror / and a side parting’ (‘Popping candy’). The unfolding non-drama gives impetus to Yates’ wider arc, in a narrative that refuses to fight shy of the effluent and the estuarial, down to the last horse whose arse evacuates as it walks, ‘The shit just bubbling up and popping out’.

I couldn’t say what it is about the side parting, or the munificent arse, that is refreshing in a poetics of jaundiced vision, but the trick is repeated fulsomely by a writer whose facility with simile and metaphor is acrobatic. The poem ‘Signs’ opens with the deceptively yonderly flight of a bee:

‘A bumblebee peruses the yard
like someone wandering into a bar
pretending to be on the phone
in order to use the toilet.’

The conceit, an illustration of a characteristic sleight-of-hand, is bang-on here, as unusual as it is persuasive. Whether describing the inexorable arc of a frisbee in elaborate metaphors of human trajectory (‘The frisbee’), or the unpeopled, but oddly fascinating concourse of a service station at early morning, Yates’ perception is left-field, tangential. The empty shop of ‘Forton 5AM’ betokens a wider anomic universe of commerce and synthetic vacuity:

‘The jelly babies in the pick and mix on top
of each other, faceless and without futures.
The snakes in the pick and mix are soft translucent
reptiles made out of edible chemicals.’

The pick and mix, here, are as interchangeably bland as the generic name might imply, and as luminously seductive as the hordes who will shortly fall upon them are ravening. It is not hard to find the kind of humour that is a side-effect of that same skewed approach; Yates’ poems are lit by the comedy that unintentionally inheres to the bizarre. And in this architecture of prefabricated concrete, central atriums, bedrooms illuminated by unnatural light and ubiquitous plastic coverings, the sense of single-minded direction, of purpose, evident in the behaviour of the players in this urban wasteland, is rendered ironic by the anodyne theatre unfolding around them.

cq[The pick and mix, here, are as interchangeably bland as the generic name might imply...]
There is great skill in Yates’ realisation: standing several degrees outside of a landscape that is both instantly recognisable and oddly tangential, the poet reifies the suggestion of surreality by investing each new observation with the distinctness of a recent discovery. And in this sense, his poems are given a feint Martian patina, as though, like Craig Raine’s alien ‘interpreter’, everything his narrator surveys is entirely novel and therefore expressible only through the agency of metaphor. It is a characteristic of this poet’s art to insinuate startling hiatuses of detail en passant. In the only prose poem in this collection, the cyclist/narrator bounces the ingredients of a shepherd’s pie into an untimely amalgam by rolling off the kerb. As the ‘cooking’ proceeds, he is momentarily distracted:

‘The rain was getting heavier. I went past the
scrapyard, an unmanned crane was holding up a Nissan Micra
as though it had been examining it before falling asleep.’ (‘On the experience of accidentally preparing a vegetarian shepherd’s pie in a bike basket on the way home’)

Yates’ use of formal structures – he mostly operates within a framework of uniform verse lengths – is reinforced by such stylistic mechanisms, since much of the collection is conceived in a form that places the faux-innocent narrator front and centre; in this regard, the approach almost becomes the form, or at least inheres to the overall narrative in such as way as to suggest a definitive formal shaping of the work.

I say ‘almost’ because there are tonal exceptions. Several poems in Dynamo end in that nebulous hinterland of suggestion much favoured by Larkin, and sometimes dignified, for want of a better term, by a sense of the transcendent. The exquisite heraldic animation of ‘The Flemish Primitives’ concludes in the liminal space between sky and horizon, as if the protagonist/saint were borne on wings towards a heaven we otherwise recognise as earth: ‘his face darkening and lightening up again / clouding, clearing, shining’. And elsewhere, the abandonment of the daytime world’s bleeps, noises-off and intractable complexities, facilitates for one woman, the ‘Flight mode’ of sleep, a trajectory of possibility, per ardua ad astra:

‘The door is shut. The gas is off.
The computers are on standby.
Her pyjamas are moons and stars;

her pyjamas are constellations and galaxies’.

A reminder, in this collection’s inventory of near-dystopian images, that the act of observation may also be an act of celebration, that the teeming sense of misdirection in a purposeless universe is no less an affirmation than the very presence of dialogue in Waiting for Godot. At his very best, Luke Samuel Yates informs his vision with a sense of stilled silence, slowing his narrative to a recumbent pace, to yield the panoptic distillation of a train journey in moments of staggering, simplistic beauty:

‘Out there, in the centres-villes,
French ladies sat, smoking on stools,
their hosiery crossed and manners plaited,
kissing each word goodbye as it leaves their mouths.' ('France')