In Part II of ‘The Alexandrian Library’, Don Paterson casts his speaker as a passive photographic subject. The poet-figure not only emerges in ‘a caption of light’ but is captioned and captured by it:

Leading the gaze to the startling appropriations of a camera, to its uninvited flash and lens, these lines associate the photographic shot with dangerous over-illumination. Paterson imagines a device homing in on and focusing the lyric subject against its will: ‘like an unfinished strip-cartoon / of which you are clearly the punchline’ (Gift 48). If we laugh at the paranoid slapstick, we are also not to take our eye off the effects of ‘unfinished’ and overexposed. However, it is not just the flash of the camera, but also the power of the poem's own imagining that pins the speaker down into a visual and linguistic joke. Held fast as that captive of brightness, as a ‘strip-cartoon’, he portrays himself as nakedly vulnerable with photographic bulbs going off. He fears taking shape through the lenses of others, where he will be pored over, set down (and set up) like a page of print: forced permanently to take uncertain form. Paterson's poet imagines that being snapped by the camera and letterpressed into posterity is a way of entering into print that involves violent exposure and fixity: work and person will be dazzled into self-revelation before their time. The perspective provided is ‘a view / of yourself from above’, preserved in the infancy of composition – developing before, rather than through, your own gaze. It is an excess of illumination that blinds. Rather than guiding, light is depicted as aggressively obscuring his view.

‘[T]he light of sense goes out, but with a flash that has revealed the invisible world,’ writes Roland Barthes.