The gaze of the Gorgon, the title of Harrison's 1992 BBC film/poem and the eponymous image of his volume of poems for that year, which was his first book-length collection for over a decade, presides over much of his later work. The image recalls earlier presiding influences, the gargoyle of ‘Prague Spring’, about to puke his wassail on the listening throng that will appear for the morrow's Mayday military parade; or the stone head of the satyr on the cover of U.S. Martial, tuned into the New York chatter, presiding over the poet's transmission of Martial's Roman epigrams into a contemporary urban vernacular. In both those earlier examples the poet simultaneously sets himself apart from the stone head, while allying himself with its presiding vantage – and that vantage is the sort of cultural supervision he stages himself as occupying in other instances, for example when he describes his role in The Mysteries as the ‘Yorkshire poet who came to read the metre’. Although the Gorgon's gaze offers a significant twist on those earlier images – importantly, the Gorgon's incorporation of terror for and hatred of humanity means that hers is an influence that must be opposed by the poet – we will miss something of the specific mise-en-scène of Harrison's poetic if we ignore the extent to which the poet takes on for himself the vantage of the presiding gaze, even if that be the gaze of the Gorgon. For him the presiding vantage is to do with seeing, knowing and speaking on behalf of. But with the Gorgon we are into opposite areas, of non-seeing (those eyeless faces of the warrior Achilles’ helmet and the Gulf War tank that adorn the cover of The Gaze of the Gorgon); the erasure of memory and understanding, and the obliteration of speech (the Gorgon film includes a hideous montage of war-shattered faces: ‘What poems will this mouth recite?’). That is to say, the vantage that the poet would occupy (recalling his earlier combative use of that word: ‘We'll occupy your lousy leasehold poetry’) is one that, in terms of the present myth, threatens the technologies and values that he would espouse. There is a sense here in which poetry is encountering, through displacement, its own fear of itself.