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Synopsis
Goblin Lawn Peter Bennet New and Selected Poems • A Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Autumn • Includes a substantial section of previously uncollected poems • Plus a large selection of the best of Bennet’s more recent work • An intriguing and rewarding poet who offers an enigmatic vision of the world For his ‘New and Selected Poems’, Goblin Lawn, Peter Bennet has concentrated mostly on work written since 1999, including his two most ambitious poems, the historically rich and complex sequences, ‘The Long Pack' and 'Jigger Nods'. The other three sections consist of shorter poems: twenty from his collection Ha-Ha, twenty from Noctua, and a final group of twenty-one new and uncollected poems gathered under the erudite subtitle ‘Apokatastesis’. Bennet is a perfectionist wordsmith who demands attentive reading. Peter Bennet lives in Northumberland near the Wild Hills o' Wanney. He taught at five schools, then worked in adult education for colleges and universities in the North East of England, including 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. 'An individual voice is present, unaffected, direct and conversational, but capable without the least sense of dislocation of rising to a note of restrained rhetorical power.’ Vernon Scannell ‘These poems grow on you. They repay renewed and careful reading. Where they first seem obscure, they become intriguing; then rather haunting, glimpses of lives in a variety of strange circumstances and locations. They are very careful, even compressed; but the effect, as you read again, is of something – disquiet, regret, fear – being opened up.’ David Constantine ‘There is humour, too, a wild gothicity as if damped down by Novocaine.' John Lucas
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