Mischief

Peter Bennet was born in Staffordshire in 1942. He went as a scholarship boy to King’s School Macclesfield, and then to Manchester College of Art and Design, where he was influenced by Norman Adams and his wife, the poet Anna Adams. He taught in secondary and further education, including work with redundant steelworkers following the closure of Consett Steel Works, and spent sixteen years as Tutor Organiser for Northumberland with the Workers’ Educational Association. He gave up painting for writing in 1980 and did a part-time MA at Newcastle University, including a study of W.S.Graham. 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), all published by Flambard Press, and features his four major sequences, The Long Pack, Jigger Nods, Folly Wood and Bobby Bendick’s Ride, as well as a selection of new poems. His latest collection, Mischief, was published by Bloodaxe in 2018. He has received major awards from New Writing North and Arts Council England and been a prizewinner in the National and the Arvon International Poetry Competitions, and in the Basil Bunting Awards. He lived for thirty-three 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.

• 9 The Place I Am10 The Riddle11 Miss Hood in the Nursing Home12 Old Fashioned13 Auberge14 The Unsafe Landing15 Tales of Tesco16 Boustrophedon Lang Syne18 The Comfort Service19 The Leopard20 The Laboratory21 La Morale de Joujou22 A Helpmeet for Protestant Mystics23 The Muse and the Fridge24 The Heiress25 Like Me26 Three of Us27 Listening to Bees28 The Old Stacks29 The Better Place30 After Dark at Lindisfarne Castle31 Gantries32 The Magic Castle33 The Unicorn34 Remission35 LANDSCAPE WITH PSYCHE42 The Turtle Holiday43 Proxy44 Next Time45 The Winpole Boy46 After Pevsner47 The Nuisances48 Pastoral49 The Ornithologist50 Resting Rats51 Virgil52 French Windows53 The Philosopher54 Barefooted55 The Trouser Button56 Sanquar57 LADDEREDGE AND COTISLEA67 The Gypsy Fiddle68 The Columns69 The Vapour Trail70 An Exhibition Catalogue71 Death and the Spinster72 The Cormorant73 Seasons74 News of a Death75 My Mother at Erbistock76 A Piano in Hobart 79 Notes

‘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