Care and attention, one would think, would be essential parts of any poet's method but few display those virtues better than Denise Bennett in her new collection, published as a commended entry in the Indigo Dreams pamphlet competition.
It is in the choice of words where she goes beyond a satisfactory choice and finds a better one. 'Prinking' catrches one's attention in Making Jam Sandwiches with Stanley Spencer, and in Sometimes there is,
the inky-bleed of sky
has quartered the moon
and the reader is made to consider the 'soft, cidery skin' of the new born baby in Son. These all capture experience in gently sensual language that make them vivid.
Twenty-eight free verse poems don't rhyme on their own but the collection has been thoughtfully compiled to make a coherent whole in which poems rhyme with each other.
'Sizzle' in The Chagall Window rhymes with 'dazzle' in Piecing Together the Dark; the thirst of the soldiers at Gallipoli in the title poem rhymes with the 'last sup on earth' at the end of The Baby's Bottle; the painter Chagall rhymes with the sculptor Epstein in a couplet of poems on Jewish artists; Coventry cathedral rhymes with Chichester and poems imagining the life of Edward Thomas are followed by those on Stanley Spencer. These associations bring the poems together in sympathetic relationships that make the volume more than merely the latest poems by one of Hampshire's most admired poets.
Denise's main theme is humanity and the poems are clearly made expositions of such feelings but there is wordplay, too, in places, like,
buttercups enough
to fill a creamery,
in Dock Leaves, about a childhood memory that rhymes with other childhood poems and then contrast with moving poems about her mother in extreme old age.
In The Knight Speaks to Eleanor, Larkin's Arundel Tomb is echoed in the 'fidelity' of the couple but his careful undermining of his own, now famous, line that 'what will survive of us is love' is let be and Denise provides her own account.
But for a favourite, I'd pick Brayford, about a specific place in time with its 'centuries of secrets' that rhymes with the next poem, Boundaries, an in memoriam poem for a lady who 'had never gone beyond Exeter' / the vicar said' which is a marvellous thing to have never done in an age where increasingly people travel widely but belong anywhere less and less.
A little bit below here are details of Denise's forthcoming evening on March 17th where she will read from the book.
