Peter Bennet reports from the border between plausible narrative and the wilder territories of the imagination. This book brings together his best work of the past fifteen years, including poems from his T.S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted collection, The Glass Swarm, and his four major sequences, The Long Pack, Jigger Nods, Folly Wood and Bobby Bendick’s Ride, as well as new work. As Andrew Motion put it, 'these poems establish the criteria by which they must be judged'.
''The Long Pack' represents a substantial contribution to the contemporary genre of history poems.' - Sean O'Brien, Guardian
'Verbal panache that borders on the dandyish; conventional stanzas, predominantly iambic metre and occasional or elusive rhymes lend a misleadingly reassuring air to a poetry that is full of bold imaginative strokes, subversive connections and dark wit' – Poetry Book Society Bulletin.
'But such is Bennet’s way: in his world nothing is ever simple, and he tells us so with a linguistic inventiveness and panache that are rare in contemporary verse' – Times Literary Supplement.
'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.
