I like them, they are the jewellery of grown-up cities

If you notice, in that sentence, a verse-like rhyming of ''trees'' with ''breeze'' then that's because, for another essay in another place, I'm composing a poem in exultant praise of the six towers and the exciting 21st-century loveliness they impart to a hitherto drab part of our city.

From the first moment of my first glimpse of them (taken by surprise I gave an involuntary ''Wow!'' of joy) they cheered me up and the more I see of them from more perspectives the more bliss they give.

It is an achievement that lights that will so dazzlingly convert Manuka night into day are not great brutes of things (like, say, the great brutes at the MCG or the quite big beasts at the Canberra Stadium) but are instead only a trifling 47 metres tall and are slender and pretty to look at. They are reminding some folk of lacrosse sticks, while I am reminded of those dandelion seed-heads (on which you blow, crooning ''She loves me, she loves me not''), and also of those skeleton leaves you find under deciduous trees in autumn when a leaf has lost all of its fleshy tissues. The clusters and arrangements of the lamps themselves, dainty, as I say, also remind me of lingerie. But perhaps that's just me.

Anyway, what might have been great MCGesque brutes of things (which, too, I would have rejoiced over, because all broad-shouldered cities need some of them) are instead six pretty sculptures.

Aesthetes, too, will learn to love the way the slender six are inclined, with their ''heads'' and ''faces'' pointing downwards. To the imaginative and Life-loving among us they suggest six scholars discussing something important. Perhaps they are six archaeologists all looking down in awed excitement on some exquisite piece of Viking treasure just uncovered. Perhaps they are six thrilled botanists all gathered around a hitherto unknown species of native bluebell.

Those of us thrilled by the towers love the way they keep springing visual surprises on us. They have changed some weary, cliched old vistas. So for example, emerging from the Manuka Arts Centre (next to the Manuka Pool) one day this week and looking up and about where there used to be trees and sky, I found the six towers looming affably, gently, but startlingly in that space.

They are startling. We read that ''design criteria were set by the National Capital Authority to ensure the lights blended into the inner-south suburb'' but of course, as some of the many critics of the lights are saying, this claim is absurd. Thank goodness, though, that they don't blend. It would have been a terrible shame if they had. What the city needs, and what it has got with this six-piece masterpiece, are more man-made things that are city-changingly, city-liftingly, show-off obvious. I see that Kambah's most tiresome miserabilist has written to the Editor offering his sympathy to the burghers of Manuka's neighbourhood who must see the towers. But I know that I speak for everyone in my suburb of Garran when I say I only wish we could see the towers, but alas the great blob of Red Hill (on whose superior flanks most of the opponents of the towers live) gets in the way.

The Eiffel Tower agitated lots of the people of Paris when it was announced, and while it was being built. Guy de Maupassant ridiculed it as a ''high and skinny pyramid of iron ladders,'' and a petition of 300 names - including those of Guy de Maupassant, Emile Zola and Charles Garnier (architect of the Opera Garnier) - was presented to the city government. The petition read, ''We, the writers, painters, sculptors, architects and lovers of the beauty of Paris, do protest with all our vigour and all our indignation, in the name of French taste and endangered French art and history, against the useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower.''

In Paris at the time I might have signed that petition but what saves the new pylon cluster from Eiffelesque ridicule is that, apart from being so aesthetically welcome, it's certainly not ''useless''. The state-of-the-art, best-in-the-world lanterns will serve a great purpose, the bringing of new-fangled electric light to night-time Manuka Oval so that over the years millions of Canberrans will have good-natured, community-building fun together.

Floodlighting towers like these do wonders for a city's good looks. Mere towns and little, try-hard cities don't have such things. The towers say ''Look! Here's a place where exciting things happen! Where people come in their cheering, jostling tens of thousands!''

Light towers like these are the jewellery worn by real, grown-up, voluptuous cities.