Brand New Ancients

If a soul wishes to be sure of the road she treads on,
she must close her eyes and
walk in the dark.
- St. John of the Cross

"The new Dionysus is in his dressing room preening,
the make-up girls hold their breath as they dream him
into a perfect bronze and then leave him
to his pre-show routine of stretching and breathing.
He winks in the mirror as he flosses his teeth,
pulls his trousers up to his nipples and strides out to the stage."

"Tempest’s ‘perfect bronze’ is worth savouring, as the brand new and the ancient collide again. The TV perma-tan suggests narcissism and the nod to the bronzes of classical sculpture shows how far short of the ideal our celebrity culture falls. Perhaps we don’t even aspire to look beautiful anymore – we aspire to ‘airbrushed bodies that shine golden.’ Does the line imply that we all aspire to stand naked as we’re spray-painted, or does it suggest that we’d rather be retouched on Photoshop – after all, if we look good in the pictures, who gives a damn how we look in the flesh?

Brand New Ancients is an invigorating experience. Tempest handles her cast with kindness and generosity and, as with much satire, there’s a deep vein of conservatism here too. In The Battle of the Books (1704), Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope side with the timeless Classical Ancients, launching a scathing attack on the Moderns, on the writing and values of their own time. Tempest’s poem fits within this tradition, presenting modern culture as vacuous. She prefers to look back, celebrating the values which make the Ancients our brothers and sisters, celebrating the heroism seen everyday in the districts of her beloved south-east London and, thankfully, everywhere." - John Field

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