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.

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PETER BENNET

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.

‘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 (2013)

‘His poems frequently have an irresistible narrative drive and are peopled by characters that are engaging in spite of their strangeness… This is an exceptional body of work by a poet of rare gifts.’ – DAVID COOKE, The North

Cover wood engraving: Sharpening the Scythe (1935) by Clare Leighton

BY PERMISSION OF THE ESTATE OF CLARE LEIGHTON

PETER BENNET

Mischief

For Sue

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following publications in which some of these poems first appeared: The Compass, The High Window, Island (Australia), The North, Shadow Script: twelve poems for Lindisfarne and Bamburgh (NCLA, 2013) and The Times Literary Supplement.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

The Place I Am

The Riddle

Miss Hood in the Nursing Home

Old Fashioned

Auberge

The Unsafe Landing

Tales of Tesco

Boustrophedon Lang Syne

The Comfort Service

The Leopard

The Laboratory

La Morale de Joujou

A Helpmeet for Protestant Mystics

The Muse and the Fridge

The Heiress

Like Me

Three of Us

Listening to Bees

The Old Stacks

The Better Place

After Dark at Lindisfarne Castle

Gantries

The Magic Castle

The Unicorn

Remission

LANDSCAPE WITH PSYCHE

The Turtle Holiday

Proxy

Next Time

The Winpole Boy

After Pevsner

The Nuisances

Pastoral

The Ornithologist

Resting Rats

Virgil

French Windows

The Philosopher

Barefooted

The Trouser Button

Sanquar

LADDEREDGE AND COTISLEA

The Gypsy Fiddle

The Columns

The Vapour Trail

An Exhibition Catalogue

Death and the Spinster

The Cormorant

Seasons

News of a Death

My Mother at Erbistock

A Piano in Hobart

NOTES

About the Author

Copyright

The Place I Am

I have become a master of the craft

of moulding, patiently and with precision,

lethargy into shapes of hours and days.

My cast of mind requires a library

of books I wrote myself, sufficient booze

and shabby furniture. Beyond

the balcony is marshy coast. My gaze

slides along pewter-coloured horizontals

that evening sunlight turns to bronze.

It is a habitat where rare plants learn

to live with salt, and birds nest on the ground.

It is the place I am. It should be empty

of any presence otherwise.

Rage and tales of unmapped quicksand

are not discouraging enough.

The landscape fades. I fade. I mourn its beauty

leached into sketch and photograph

or into notebooks that birdwatchers carry.

The sea is close. I fear death by erosion.

It has grown dark but now the sky is starry.

I’ll jot down where I’d like my body found

but not by whom. I think that’s better left.

And better left, I also think, is when.

The airport glows inland. A homing plane

blinks across the ankles of Orion.

The Riddle

The