Mischief

By Peter Bennet

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Nov 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781780374413

Peter Bennet

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 Whitley Bay. 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). His latest collection, Mischief, is out from Bloodaxe in 2018.