Nayler & Folly Wood
New & Selected Poems
A comprehensive selection of poetry from a poet whose work nothing is what it seems to be. Modern spaces are haunted by the past and the unreal. We cannot tell the encroacher from the encroached. Discontinuities in time and space and playful short-circuitings produce exhilarating shivers.
Peter Bennet is an astute observer of people, places, and things, however, and we find ourselves surprisingly at home on this border between plausible narrative and the wilder territories of the imagination.
This selection reflects Bennet’s full range for the first time, beginning with poems from the early 1980s and drawing on seven collections published since then, including his major sequences: The Long Pack, Jigger Nods, Folly Wood, Bobby Bendick’s Ride, Landscape with Psyche and Ladderedge and Cotislea. New work introduced here centres on another major and powerfully imagined sequence, a colloquy which bridges three centuries to evoke the voice of the Quaker James Nayler, who was abominably punished for ‘horrid blasphemy’.
Peter Bennet taught in secondary and further education, including work with redundant steelworkers following the closure of Consett Steel Works, and spent 16 years as Tutor Organiser for Northumberland with the Workers’ Educational Association. He lived for 33 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 North Shields. His Bloodaxe The Glass Swarm (2008) was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
