Beginnings: Selected Verse

By Benbo Smith and Miles Wall

Justice. Equality. Join Benbo Smith as he takes a stand for what’s right.

Poetry can be a platform for social change. With his distinct voice, poet Benbo Smith tackles unjust societal structures in a series of allegories on politics, economics, discrimination, and other ailments of the modern era.

Using the special art form

• Language: English
• Publisher: Splashlime
• Release date: Mar 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781526201805

Benbo Smith

Smith was born in the early 1970s on the south bank of the river Thames in London. After graduating from the University of Hull in the North of England, Smith spent time living and working in Canada and the United States before returning to London. He has now settled in Buckhurst Hill, on the outskirts of London. He spends his time watching his beloved football team, writing and walking in Epping Forest.

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About the Author

Benbo Smith was born in London, England in the early 1970s, and is a graduate of the University of Hull. This book is his first fictional work in many years.

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Foreword by Miles Wall

Smith’s poems deal with real life, the grim, the hard, the political and social economics of constraint. His poetry is a platform for invoking discussion with the reader. He firmly believes that a poem can have its own and distinct voice, sending a message to the reader that provokes a response.

I will tell you now that Smith is not always an easy author to read.  His prose is poetic, yet not prose poetry.  His free verse style sometimes follows established rules of meter and form just when you have realised that it does not.  He will break rhymes with no warning, and start a poem with prose, only to switch into verse halfway through. Yes, Smith is hard to read. Yet with hard work, you will see under the surface of this quasi accessible text, and when you do, it will have been worth it.

Smith will often help, for he is aware that his eclectic use of styles can present barriers to the reader. In his short poetic narrative Judgement, Smith makes a point of using a Germanic word, phonically spelled in English so that the non-German reader can pronounce the word with the intended sound.  Thus he uses toad instead of Tod. In