Gold Light Shining
Gold Light Shining by Bebe Ashley is our poetry recommendation for March. Gold Light Shining is Ashley’s debut poetry collection out with Banshee Press. Bebe Ashley lives in Belfast and is pursuing a Ph.D. at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry. Her work has appeared in Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Poetry Ireland Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, and The Tangerine. When writing about a book I think it is helpful to include the blurb as this is what folks might first read if they picked up this book in a bookshop. On the back cover, we are told of Gold Light Shining:
Bebe Ashley spins gold from the detritus of the internet. A landscape often depicted as a wasteland is illuminated in poems that explore celebrity, obsession, sexuality, coming of age, and that charismatic enigma, Harry Styles.
Inspired by sources as diverse as Styles’s track listings, Scandi web series Skam and One Direction newsletters, Ashley spins us across continents on a tour of the surreal highs and absurd lows of celebrity culture. There are poems of youth and yearning, yet they’re suffused with the hard-won wisdom that the communities we build can be as meaningful as the families we’re born into.
I was just a bit too old to be in the thick of the One Direction era. My boy bands were N’Sync and Backstreet Boys and to be honest I was always much more of a girl group kind of person anyway. I watched as young girls experienced the rush of pop music obsession and remember circulating a meme after the band broke up offering comfort in how my generation survived the Spice Girls’ break up and so they would survive the demise of One Direction. It was dramatic but I think that pop culture is worthy of being talked about and analyzed. So when I read the theme for this poetry collection I knew it would be something I loved.
In the notes section, Ashley suggests listening to Harry Styles’s music while reading, and I found that super fun but also enlightening on some of the more specific references to his music and career. I love when a book makes something so interesting that I feel compelled to look things up, read articles and do research, which this collection inspired me to do. I spent a whole afternoon reading interviews and listening to Styles’s music and then flipping back to the poetry. It took me back to the days when I would cut out photographs of the Spice Girls and read interviews with them over and over while listening to their songs. Some folks might not want to dive in so deeply, and that works too as the writing is accessible and lyrical. You don’t have to be a fan of Harry Styles to enjoy this collection.
Ashley writes beautifully about celebrity and youth with humor and self-awareness. Often, the first love we experience is the love we have for a pop star or actor or some other unattainable celebrity. This love can be so consuming. I remember devouring anything I could find about the Spice Girls, and I would spend hours talking about them and listening to their CDs with my friends. It took a long time for me to recognize that how I felt was a kind of love. It is easy to brush off a girl’s love of a celebrity as silly and useless, but there is a depth to being able to love someone or something we can’t touch. Gold Light Shining captures this feeling and elaborated on it beautifully.
Some More Information On Gold Light Shining: