Daniel Bennett
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Pithy and poised: On James Peake’s ‘The Third City’
Daniel Bennett James Peake’s third book, The Third City (Two Rivers Press, 2025), is a short collection of around 40 pages, but it represents a fifteen-minute city of intimacy and history. I liked the use of the first person in the work here, the sliding sense of someone who is there but always ahead…
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Three poems by Daniel Bennett
Red Check Shacket I’d heard the stories: the timeon Cromer beach, some oozinghallucinated morning, whereamongst the bladder wrackand shreds of net, he founda jetsam blister pack of pillsand snorted every one. Peopletold me to take anything he saidwith a pinch of salt: his father,broken from his wife’s affairbailing out of a stricken planeat ten thousand…
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Three poems by Daniel Bennett
Photo by Krišjānis Kazaks on Unsplash Chris’s Room When Auden bought his first home- a farmhouse in Kirchstetten- he wept tears of happiness for the days of impermanence he was able to relinquish, the simple anticipation of place. And I have never been far from the routine of cheap…
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A statement for the importance of poems in a life: on Jonathan Davidson’s ‘A Commonplace’
Daniel Bennett A sense of place abounds in Jonathan Davidson’s A Commonplace (Smith-Doorstep, 2020), and while that might seem natural from the title, the ‘place’ here derives from a translation of the Latin term ‘locus communis’ or ‘a general or common topic’. Commonplace books were collections of sayings, proverbs or quotations on…
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On ‘Bloom’ by Sarah Westcott
Daniel Bennett The poems in this luminous book, Bloom (Pavilion Press, 2021) are tight, fragmented things, varying in shape and typesetting, in a style both abstract and committed: the world placed firmly underfoot even as the work revels in strangeness and uncertainty. The first poem, ‘Apples’, strains at the edges of form, and…
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On ‘Map of a Plantation’ by Jenny Mitchell
Daniel Bennett The title of Jenny Mitchell’s follow-up collection to 2019’s Her Lost Language begins with a gesture to objectivity. Map of a Plantation (Indigo Dreams, 2021) – we’re offered a sense of distance, a dispassionate realm of depiction, the chart not the territory. In reality, anyone who has ever looked at…
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On ‘Heredity/ASTYNOME’ by Naush Sabah
Daniel Bennett If poetry ever had ‘must have’ purchases, then Naush Sabah’s debut release from Broken Sleep Books proved to be one of these over the summer. The pamphlet, the chapbook, the little magazine: these are as essential a part of the medium of poetry as the poems themselves. Heredity/ASTYNOME is a…
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Three poems by Daniel Bennett
Figures in a Landscape Remember when the country offered a pathway to freedom? The creek lanes and brooks and railway arches, spaces we filled with imagination and talk. Often talk. Abroad along the edges of wheat fields and rural car parks, any escape from our essentially loving households, where indulgence stuck…
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On ‘Belladonna’ by Suna Afshan
Daniel Bennett Both grounded and detached, playing with a sense of narrative but also revelling in the rarefied brightness of the image, Suna Afshan’s debut chapbook Belladonna, from Broken Sleep Books, is an experience notable for its intensity and a sense of writing that comes from beyond time. A single poem…