Shearsman Gallery: Andrew Duncan - review of Michael Ayres

The visual sense is amplified here, intervening through optical effects of magnification and sudden changes of perspective. The basis of the Ayres poem is a medium — whether photography, paint, or simply memory — which captures visual images and preserves them, even if they had been instants of motion them from fleeting away. Six out of twenty-four poems here set out from works of visual art. In 'The incredible shrinking man', the victim-hero is seen almost as an effect produced by playing with lenses:

The body first.
All the intricate imbroglio of muscles
shrinking down to the innards of a watch,
then scaled down further.
This is the micro of all his considerations.

In the use of visual art as a starting-point for long, hypnotic explorations, he reminds me of a very different poet, Frank Kuppner; there are only so many solutions available in a given period. The images are suspended during their course to the eye, and not wholly credible; we read

Aloof in gardens,
they have a rueful experience
of other upheavals;
sensing the wasteland in their hands,
back-masked by irony,

and the rare word back-masked is presumably drawn from sound recording, where it means (or, has been claimed in the press to mean) transcribing messages in reverse: the landscape is a series of images whose meaning can be 'reversed'. Perception is not yet meaning; what is no longer perception, is no longer trustworthy.

Once everything has been reduced to a picture, one can then view both the scene and the I as designed objects, enhanced in post-processing. This narcissism is the most common, cheap, discourse of our society, copiously available in advertisements, which Ayres exhibits to gun down: 'In a drowned, aquanigrescent light/ he holds her skin: /Obsession for the body/ c. 1986'. Obsession is also a brand name; the careful dating is typical of his fastidious attention to appearances, but also signals the transience of wishes, their negation by the forces of imitation which aroused them. Later we read: 'Praetorian thug, // classical skin veneer & inside / a city of glistening organs, miles / of tapes' (also from 'Raw Materials', published in First Offense #5): where the superiority of the human in the advertisement is translated simply into domination. Ayres is clever enough to know that advertisements do portray our desires and so carry out a function inevitably carried out by symbols, and which art must also carry out. It would be perverse to say that the models in photographs, in advertisements or for shows, are not beautiful; Ayres's purpose is to write beautiful poems. He loves the fluids around the body — light as perfume: two corpus resting / complete with drifting / starfish hands / on a seafloor of desire waves in upper light / ripplingly striate, with soft bars, a link of bliss with weightlessness which recurs in Jeffrey Wainwright, W.N. Herbert, and Nigel Wheale. Almost, this is the blind sight of those who move by dark of intuition/ and the common surface of their skin (N.W.), closing out deception in direct sensation. The drowned girl, painted by Caravaggio, in 'The dyer's hand', oddly anticipates 'Pool' (1994) in its link of water and sexuality:

I think of the painter's hands, their tenderness, their cold giving
exact ash, lip-ash, ash on the tongue
and the transfigured, suffering
of that sex-shelled, tide-gnawed girl
from trash to Madonna in the art
which brushes against us with a calling loveliness
as we move back to society

Another association, for me, is DAF, whose transition from scratchy little punk band to highly capitalized disco/torch song gods marked, even more than Cab Volt’s brush with Arthur Baker, the turning of an era; the song in question is 1981's ‘Sex unter Wasser’: ?I? Das Schönste was es gibt / Wenn du mich im Wasser liebst. The embracing medium is the lover’s body, and the moment when inner and outer fluids merge is the rippling transverse and longitudinal muscle contractions called ejaculation.

The quality distinguishing ads from art would be their brevity. Like Kuppner, Ayres has nothing to do with short forms: the autonomy of the work of art is located in its length; the resultant legato, long smooth curves of language, reminds me of the 'labyrinthine clarity' of New Order. They are opulent, even: the momentum of large-scale symmetrical forms, swept like the side of a liner, carries the reader away. He wants that 'classical skin veneer & inside a city of glistening organs'. He wants the poet-narrator to experience the misery, inferiority, of a victim in a totalised society, but also to possess the attraction and superiority of the MegaVisual tradition, and even of ads for male perfume.

The scenes critical of the Government are numerous; in 'Raw Materials' there is a mention of 'Mussels/ changing sex on a polluted coastline', and an evocation of greedy and violent landowners as the human reality of a 'pastoral' English landscape; in 'Docklands' the liquidation of the old community in London's docklands makes way for an imaginary new financial quarter ('whatever has power survives/ when the powerless goes to the ground'); in 'The famine in Africa' he evokes the burning of cattle infected with BSE, a brain disease causing dementia, as a result of gross failures of control in the livestock industry. Perhaps he is treating politics from an optic point of view, as media distortions: the fate of the image within a data-processing medium, perhaps a software package called LieMakerPro or SuppressExpress. He is comparing the visibly decaying urban fabric with an imagined ideal which would resemble the symmetry and opulence of the verse cadence:

Lights bathing the perimeter wire.
Susurration of fruit-trees.
Bats in evening.
Silent pollution of agrichemicals.
Night falling on a siloed plain.
Sleek grain coffins, cereal tankers at rest
in the siding of a provincial station
seen from a snubbing 125.
Allocated eel, slip.
Ripplelap; ripplelap & wash, inwash
of a tide
with frothed rocks.
On a cliff-face, white birds nesting.
Small islands cordoned off.
Materials buried in a mine.
Our island people.
Materials still alive.

The fastidiousness of the language may distract us from the message of military pollution (an island in the Hebrides cordoned off because of its infection with an agent developed for bacterial warfare) and nuclear pollution (dangerous 'live' waste buried in mines); the beautiful waves may be in offshore waters poisoned by algal blooms due to offwash of fertilisers. Other fluids stained with other substances.

Poets maturing in the 1970s were most attracted to the disruption of the surface, or unity, of the work of art: because the second half of the Seventies were the era of aggressive 'conceptual' and critical art, of punk rock, of violent social conflicts, triggered by worldwide inflation, which destroyed the post-war consensus. Ayres (b.1958) is both politicized and critical; but in the Eighties, the poets mentioned all experienced the urge to be sleek, coherent, highly finished, persuasive, to avoid being written off with the incoherent, unwelcoming, wholly negative, etc. work with which Sixties radicalism climaxed and died. In rock music, this meant the turn around 1982 from ‘Metal Box’, by PiL, the pop group, 'Voice of America' by Cabaret Voltaire, and The Clash, to 'Sister Feelings Call', by Simple Minds, ‘Pornography’, by The Cure, and ‘Blue Monday’, by New Order. Punk groups called in commercial producers to make their music sound like disco music. Disruption only had any effectiveness for the audience in the short term. The audience stopped having the conversion experience. The malice of time forced artists to move back to the virtues of beauty, harmony, tunefulness, of tempting surface appeal, of internal order and the artistic illusion. Although Ayres' work prior to 1987 is not available, it seems likely that he too is caught between the wishes to engender, by means of contradiction, alarm, for political purposes, and to engender, by means of long smooth forms, tranquility and artistic bliss. His political poems have a curious aestheticism, whereby the lighting, cutting, and patterning of the material is more fascinating than the political reactions it might arouse. This is the flip side of political art wasting its effectiveness by being ugly and grubby.

Ayres likes the method of composition around repeating key lines. This is a feature of oral, non-composed music; as repetition with variation it recurs in contemporary music based on programmable synthesizers. The cyclicity points away from the idea of efficient information content, denies a straight line of progress, and redirects attention to the texture of the poem. Recurrence binds the poems as they avoid a logical structure; it allows a loose flow of sense without drift. Indeed, the poems retain the hard montage that was a feature of critical art, but soothed now by a billowing melopoeia of rhythmic organization. The willingness to exploit data from television, advertisements, the newspapers, paintings, etc., caused breaches of tonal 'envelope', which were solved, later on, by minute attention to editing; as Mies van der Rohe is said to have spent endless time designing the corners of his skyscrapers, the point of transition between two planes. The covering of links, false transitions, which in propaganda, or television news, would be seen as inauthenticity, thus becomes in poetry the sign of aesthetic autonomy and elegance: the glaze. It would be a mistake to identify this unity of effacement with the poet's 'personality'. The acceptance of mediation, adding to sense data and reflection, is the sign of authenticity; since single point of view accounts are quite unable to explain to us how society works, the poem must link and compile many eyewitness accounts in order to become plausible as a narrative of events.