Novelist Philip Roth described his life as turning sentences around: “I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning” (The Ghost Writer, 1979).
The poems in Luke Yates’ Dynamo often suggest a similar care for sentences, with an attention to syntax and language but taking a more lyrical approach suitable for poetry; take these lines about a choice of footwear – “Last summer it seemed/nothing would ever change/but today you are a person/who wears desert boots/and might fall in love” (“Desert Boots”).
But turning sentences around and getting the words in the right order only gets us so far. Yates’ poetry also has the benefit of original ideas expressed in striking imagery: the Frisbee flies “like a moon orbiting the weekend/a fruit propelled/by its own sweetness” (“The Frisbee”); a bumblebee “peruses the yard/like someone wandering into a bar/pretending to be on the phone/in order to use the toilet” (“The Signs”); the room had “the print of an iron melted into its carpet/as though the iron had tried to leave” (“The good morning”).
This originality extends to such matters as an experiment in unexpected food preparation (in prose poem “On the experience of accidentally preparing a vegetarian shepherd’s pie in a bike basket on the way home”) and “Treading on another tall man’s long foot”, in which the poet thinks of a brother he never had. There’s a disconcerting “Song about putting a bird in a pie” with a man in a bin and an exploding teabag, a surrealist pair of scissors striding around the town centre in “The pair of scissors that could cut anything”, and a character who doesn’t eat vegetables or fruit – “her bowel age was 71” (“Finding Bobby”).
Dynamo has a thread of quiet conflict through its human struggle and misunderstanding in a world under threat, a “planet of traffic jams” (“Going Somewhere”), “a big hamster ball” where the television shows wildfires and the colour of the sea is surprising (“Short-term lets”). The “diminishing world” of “Hotpot” is down to us (“Maybe we didn’t try hard enough./Now the mountains are dessert”); in “France” the propellers of air turbines comically stir the air into “meringues/that only they could see/but that everyone could eat”.
The poet’s focus on the twitches and vibrations of life creates its own poetic energy, “like a boat rubbing/on something it is moored to/or must pass” (“Moving”), with the title poem comparing human endeavour – picking up the post, turning on the oven, looking at the clock – to a dynamo “working off the movement of the earth in space”.
Back on earth, we’re often situated in a recognisable England – Blackpool souvenir and chip shops (“Stopping the White Man March”) and cliffs coming into view like a line of bad teeth (The bikers”). National and personal identity is difficult – the Bikers aren’t fascists but love seals and the EU, and it’s the young deer leaping through the gorse that are likened to Hitler youth.
At times the muted English tone makes one think of Larkin; in “Persimmon” there are “people looking for a way/into the next part of their lives” and the relationship troubles of “Can’t” mean that “all kinds of possibilities/are slipping away”. Work is something like Larkin’s toad squatting on life, with employment taking its toll on a couple in “Getting to travel a lot with your job”, the travelling partner “tired as much/of coming back/as being away”. What seems like a downbeat job in retail is considered in “The mystery shopper” – “the customers are like the universe, they never end” and the employee is “just a conveyor belt/for thinking about/endings”. Then there’s the thin divide between work and leisure in “After Work”, with a frank admission of not knowing how to manage routine and technology:
We spend the day with one machine
Then go home to another.
I don’t have the solution.
Just recommendations: books, films,love, struggle, sleep.
We leave streams of pixels
on the pavements behind us, fallen
Christmas decorations.
Many of these poems memorably manage to capture moments in time like photographic snapshots. Sunflowers grew “like a bar chart/presenting possible answers/to a question/I had not asked” (“And the year you moved in”). Minutes “opened up in front of us/like a large transparent origami structure” (“Somehow I had written the times down wrong”). “Flight mode” artfully describes someone shutting down for the night, and “Mike and Annette’s Working Week” is at pains to set out an order of events but is weighed down with history.
Yates is insightful on the detail of modern life, looking at every day experiences in different ways. “The man on the plane had paid” looks at an airline trip strictly through economics. “And the year you moved in” reminds us of the peculiarity of watching foreign TV – “watching images move across a screen/and the people saying things in one language/and the words below in another/and then the meanings”. “Done up by the landlord” shows us how the significance of objects can change (a pineapple is seen at different times as a trophy, a celebrated colonial-era dinner party treat, and an ordinary inexpensive supermarket fruit); meaning is relative – a ball (later in the poem a “ball of thought”) is suspended for a dog “that is so enthusiastic about the ball/it has forgotten what it is/and everything else if it ever/knew anything at all”.
The poet’s repertoire is not limited to the observational and there are some impressive more personal poems included in the collection. The subtle kitchen sink drama in the twelve lines of “They’re quite famous, apparently” is a standout, with the downward trajectory of a relationship documented in three stanzas; from minor annoyance (stanza one) to bewilderment (stanza two) and final sad ending (stanza three), where heartbreak is quietly assimilated so that:
Suddenly, she’s moving out
and I’m getting into swimming
Up and down the pool I go, plunging my head
again and again into the water.
Publisher: The Poetry Business
Publication Date: 01 MAR 2023
Poetic Justice 