Mischief

Peter Bennet is a storyteller who reinvents the world each time he writes, and does so with linguistic resourcefulness and panache, bold imaginative strokes, subversive connections, and dark wit. He has also armed himself with a sophisticated dramatic understanding learned in part from Browning. The borders of the real and the imaginary are frequently breached here, but Mischief, which is his seventh full-length collection, also contains an uncharacteristically autobiographical and revealing sequence which revisits memories from between Bennet’s war-time early childhood and his father’s premature death in 1953. This writing is so careful, even compressed, that it feels distilled rather than made, having something of the purity and strength of a good single malt.

Table of Contents:
9 The Place I Am 10 The Riddle 11 Miss Hood in the Nursing Home 12 Old Fashioned 13 Auberge 14 The Unsafe Landing 15 Tales of Tesco 16 Boustrophedon Lang Syne 18 The Comfort Service 19 The Leopard 20 The Laboratory 21 La Morale de Joujou 22 A Helpmeet for Protestant Mystics 23 The Muse and the Fridge 24 The Heiress 25 Like Me 26 Three of Us 27 Listening to Bees 28 The Old Stacks 29 The Better Place 30 After Dark at Lindisfarne Castle 31 Gantries 32 The Magic Castle 33 The Unicorn 34 Remission 35 LANDSCAPE WITH PSYCHE 42 The Turtle Holiday 43 Proxy 44 Next Time 45 The Winpole Boy 46 After Pevsner 47 The Nuisances 48 Pastoral 49 The Ornithologist 50 Resting Rats 51 Virgil 52 French Windows 53 The Philosopher 54 Barefooted 55 The Trouser Button 56 Sanquar 57 LADDEREDGE AND COTISLEA 67 The Gypsy Fiddle 68 The Columns 69 The Vapour Trail 70 An Exhibition Catalogue 71 Death and the Spinster 72 The Cormorant 73 Seasons 74 News of a Death 75 My Mother at Erbistock 76 A Piano in Hobart 79 Notes

About the Author :
Peter Bennet was born in Staffordshire in 1942. He went as a scholarship boy to King's School Macclesfield, and then to Manchester College of Art and Design, where he was influenced by Norman Adams and his wife, the poet Anna Adams. He taught in secondary and further education, including work with redundant steelworkers following the closure of Consett Steel Works, and spent sixteen years as Tutor Organiser for Northumberland with the Workers' Educational Association. He gave up painting for writing in 1980 and did a part-time MA at Newcastle University, including a study of W.S.Graham. His Bloodaxe retrospective, Border (2013), includes work from books including Goblin Lawn (2005), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, The Glass Swarm (2008), a Poetry Book Society Choice which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and The Game of Bear (2011), all published by Flambard Press, and features his four major sequences, The Long Pack, Jigger Nods, Folly Wood and Bobby Bendick's Ride, as well as a selection of new poems. His latest collection, Mischief, was published by Bloodaxe in 2018. He has received major awards from New Writing North and Arts Council England and been a prizewinner in the National and the Arvon International Poetry Competitions, and in the Basil Bunting Awards. He lived for thirty-three years near the Wild Hills o'Wanney in Northumberland, in a cottage associated with the ballad writer James Armstrong, author of Wannie Blossoms. He now lives in Whitley Bay.

Review :
‘Peter Bennet’s supple and musically precise poems are charged with a sense of the uncanny, whether their subject is history, art or myth. Droll, frightening, crackling with an unmistakable intelligence and intensity of utterance, these poems consolidate and extend the achievement of one of the country’s most exciting poets.’ – Jacob Polley, on Border