Peter Bennet’s new collection unites skilful random rhyme and lightly handled traditional forms with characteristic imaginative power and dark humour. The poems combine an unusually broad range of reference with surprising intimacy, not least in the intricate sequence ‘Folly Wood’, which takes as a starting point the Twelve Gates of the English alchemist George Ripley.
Shortlisted for the 2008 T S Eliot Prize for Poetry, and named the Poetry Book Society Choice for Autumn 2008, The Glass Swarm confirms Bennet’s growing reputation as one of the best and most engaging poets writing today.
Peter recorded three poems from this collection for the BBC Today programme and you can listen to them here.
Tamzin Lewis interviewed Peter for the Journal's Culture section on January 6.
Peter Bennet’s world is richly and idiosyncratically imagined, a place where mysteries occupy strangely familiar landscapes, where folktale and proverb intersect with the contemporary, and where nothing is as secure or simple as it seems. The poems are full of telling detail and yet crisply economical, driven by an exact and surprising musicality. Bennet is an original: new readers have rich pleasures in store.
Sean O'Brien
The Glass Swarm should ensure that a new audience will encounter this gifted and original poet, who is currently producing his best work. [...] Bennet really does know, very precisely, how to contrive the entry of the powers of place and history into his poems without depriving them of idiosyncrasy, surprise or their darker natures.
also Sean O'Brien, in the Sunday Times (2 November 2008)
In his poem ‘Separation’, Peter Bennet refers to the past as ‘something a wise man discards’. Nonetheless, as a writer, he inhabits that past elegantly and convincingly – wholly present in the worlds he evokes. This is a rare and enviable thing. The Glass Swarm is a collection that strikes a remarkable relationship with history, commanding it with ease.
Helen Mort, in Poetry London, Spring 2009
He writes with such elegance, style and economy that you tend to get stuck on a poem, reading it over and over, like a needle skipping on vinyl.
Ian Collinson, in Poetry Nottingham 62/3 (Autumn/Winter 2008/9)
He has a natural talent for the Browningesque dramatic monologue and is happier inhabiting other lives and voices than inviting us into his own.
Nicholas Mui, in Poetry Salzburg Review, No 15 Spring 2009
Harder [than Selima Hill], but worth the work, is Peter Bennet's The Glass Swarm, a selection of peculiar parables, eccentric legends – as if assembled by an English Scheherazade.
Bill Greenwell, in The Independent (28 November 2008)
These poems grow on you. They repay renewed and careful reading.
David Constantine
Bennet’s world is profoundly English in an era where that term seems to have suffered a crisis of identity, or perhaps even memory loss. His work is suffused by an elegance of diction and a perception of landscape, both driven by a commanding historical reach and a questioning of identity that is characteristically ironic. He is the opposite of a modish voice, and is therefore all the more to be savoured.
Kate Clanchy and W.N. Herbert
There are nods to Philip Larkin, Douglass Dunn, Fleur Adcock and Gerard Manley Hopkins but mostly this is his own imaginative recreation of an England – often a rural England – fast receeding in the memory.
Keith Richmond, in Tribune, 12 September 2008
[The Glass Swarm's] historical basis is only pretext for rich exploration, elegy, musicality, the “direct and conversational”, as Vernon Scannell put it, “rising to a note of restrained rhetorical power.”
The Selectors of the PBS, explaining why it was their autumn choice.
The Glass Swarm costs £7.50 and was published in September 2008.
ISBN: 978-1-873226-99-5
Photo: Justine Lester
Peter Bennet lives in rural Northumberland near the Wild Hills o'Wanney, a strangely accoustical landscape which inspired the ballad-writer James Armstrong, and gave the young Kathleen Raine her first sense of another, more essential world.
He taught at five schools, including the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle upon Tyne, and then worked in adult education for a number of institutions throughout the North East: Derwentside College, Newcastle University, Northumberland College, the Open University, and Sunderland University. Subsequently he spent sixteen years as Tutor Organiser for Northumberland with the Workers' Educational Association.
He was Associate Editor of Stand from 1995 to 1998, and is a co-editor of Other Poetry. He received a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in 2005 for Goblin Lawn.
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