A collaboration between Simon Denison's and Philip Gross producing arresting images and poetry of an outstanding quality.

Denison presents the dark rootings of steel and concrete in a flashlit night; the feeling of something slamming into the earth, establishing its narrow vocabulary of grass, stone, mould, leaf, strut, and the strange, focused moony chill that freezes everything - moves through the clarity, steadiness and humaneness of Philip Gross's verbal imagination to create something new. And that, after all, is the idea: the making new, the exploration, or apprehension of the way things are too much and terrible, as O'Hara saw, there always being something else under and beyond the changing names of things. George Szirtes -- Publisher: Cinnamon Press
It might seem an odd choice by Simon Denison to photograph the feet of pylons, nor would they seem a likely inspiration for poetry but, in a sense, this collection is not about the starting-point but the journey. Because the subjects are too ordinary to be noticed, sudden focus gives them a strangeness which sets free the poet to follow wherever the image leads him. They acquire a sort of meditative depth but this is also a game played by the two artists. It results in a set of 14 line poems on both what is seen and the act of seeing but it suggests that the reader will make his own flight from each 'base'. Philip Gross, in his end-note, uses the image of a dog off the leash, running in wide circles but always returning to his master's feet. The photographs were made with the most basic 'pinhole' camera; not therefore shaped, in any detail, by the photographer. These impersonal images, first 'seen' only by the film itself, provoke thoughts on the nature of seeing through external media like film or the internal processing of the eye's motion. Sometimes the actual pylons are the subject - their power and elegance - but generally the photographs set the poet off at a tangent: to an ancient treasure, a paint chart or a loaf of granite bread - or beyond, to the contemplation of 'sameness' and the nature of belief. There is a serious playfulness running through the collection both in the forms and the language chosen. In `Long Exposure', (which describes the photographic process) the poet puns in parallel: 'No fast food for the eye, this - no flash-in-the-pan, slapped on the photographic plate like paparazzi-pizza...' Saccades (momentary eye-movements) become the inhabitants of a country, `Saccadia' - a conceit which gives rise to profound insights on perception and reality. 'Parable' both elevates and deprecates the whole project. The creators of this collection pursue Chesterton's Mooreeffoc principle whereby the most humdrum object can become a 'breakthrough to another / world'. -- Caroline Clark @ www.gwales.com