Photo of Daniel Bennett

DANIEL BENNETT was born in Shropshire and lives in London. His poem ‘Clickbait’ was recently commended in the National Poetry Competition 2020 and his work has been published in a variety of places, including: Wild CourtThe Manchester Review, The Frogmore Papers, The Stinging Fly, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, and The Best New British and Irish Poets 2017. His first collection West South North, North South East was published in 2019 by The High Window Press.’

 

 

Poems by Daniel Bennett for morphrog23

Birches

Along the Cut

Spring on the Balcony

Hospital

Down by the Quay 

 

Birches

 

I found myself in a small copse of young birches: a damp smell of hummus and fresh rain, the sky closed and white, the onset of spring heralded in distant, waxy light. At the edges, I recognised crowds, as though I had found my way into the empty ground between two waiting armies. The trees stood barely ten feet tall, the pale bark mottled brown at the seams, fraying, tarnished, the crowns still little more than a collection of reddish reeds. The frailty of birch bark had recently become a fascination for me, its injured skin. From a young age I have experienced an allergy to birch pollen, the drizzling catkins disintegrating into pale green dust, the intolerance spreading as I grew older to trick enzymes into finding toxins in other fruits and vegetables, peach skin and cherries, raw carrot and the white flesh of apples turning to minor poisons. The ground at the centre had soaked through with water, a bog that I struggled to navigate without dampening my shoes. Escape fantasies of my middle, urban years blurred into childhood games where I lost myself in the woods for hours on end. The first time I became aware of these trees had been during a walk with my father. The birches penned off from the rest of the woods, as though caged, diseased animals kept in isolation. A feather picked from the ground, a shotgun cartridge. A switch of young wood, slapping against a palm. The shouts of a crowd, a drum beating, an occasional note on a reed instrument. The forms of these pale trees, pervaded my imagination and even memory, the fears I had for the future, as though this was the moment to define all other moments, a beat and its silence, a voice and its echo, a message buried and retrieved after years in the far fields

 

© Daniel Bennett

 

 

Along The Cut

 

The flight path from the airbase

writes streams we forget

to read. The tracks forever lulled

beneath fallen stones,

 

the games called out across

the emptied fields. Our funny alliances

and disputes. In this we see much

that resembles poetry

 

with its airs and effect

its broad acceptance of now

which, more lately, troubles us.

Write it up for later, dreamer.

 

Late summer, with autumn waiting

in the mulch of cuttings

and yellowed scrub, the dark juice

of blackberries already

 

sticky as wine. Brambles fizz

with heat and decay, white flowers

opening and filled with fruit,

time speeding up the way

 

we watch our young grow

quickly beyond us, scampering

towards the path along the creek

down under dogwood and underpasses

 

beyond our warnings of care

and the functions of the world.

These places I hold firmly

within my skull, tangible maps:

 

creek shadows and tones,

marshland built on before floods.

How often do I find myself

so far from home?

© Daniel Bennett

 

Spring on the Balcony

 

Clocked off, falling out

of time, as though a hero

in an end of world film,

dabbling with the lost art

of leisure, a day stolen

from work. Mostly alone

indulgent but not indulged:

a glass of Italian red

is a heady decadence

offering remnants of Tuscany

from the rain and earth

stewed inside viticulture.

A cool wind sends spring

scattering down a wide street

banked by patient buildings.

Everyone tells me how I

have been lucky to live here,

of course I have been lucky.

Walking out with a dog

is to follow the necessary

exigencies of freedom.

The light on a banking jet plane

is salmon and pink on steel.

Pigeon song, blackbirds,

the diversion of hills across

a city park: I feel the pull

of age. Our middle years

are spent accommodating

old mistakes and theories,

those myths we told ourselves

as though forever walking

to the beat of a rough music,

like explaining heat death

to a stranger’s child,

I can’t even guess her age.

 

© Daniel Bennett

 

 

Hospital

 

Meanwhile, in the corridors

our journeys continue:

tumbling along the greyscale

through the balance of absolutes,

gulped across wards, atriums

and reception desks, the paths

into meaningless cul-de-sacs

offered by atrocious planning.

Doorways yawning ‘Aaaah’

open wide onto slim mortality:

an old man fiddles with his dressing;

a little girl in a neck brace

strains to hear a comic book.

In the patterns of this architecture

you can encounter a sister, son

or daughter, discover a family

reconfigured by absence,

all these people you have loved.

And the room which waits for you,

holds a chair, a chart, a screen

glowing with the body’s pathways:

a throat bunged with scar tissue,

the silver pollen of a lung.

You’ll hike the beating geography

of a heart and mind’s last longings,

the taste of gin or chocolate,

all those things you’d like to say.

 

© Daniel Bennett

 

 

 

 

Down By The Quay

 

He pictured himself beyond the town,

a sunrise banded on the horizon,

a fluid light, like the juice of an orange.

Instead, he traversed the traffic islands

across the overpass, down by the quay,

dogged by the strides of a viaduct,

the slow exhaustion of urban planning.

Recently, he fixated on the logic of cinema

of being watched at all times by a distant eye,

a presence like conscience or belief in god.

He would call old loves late at night

but hang up when they answered

or offer reading lists to ex-porn models

in the hope of attracting their attention,

or he would simply stay up late, drinking

watching the night sky above the street.

He knew his behaviour could only be justifiable

if performed by a doomed anti-hero

offered redemption by a final, epic act.

In fact, this was a small town with no cinema

and the only cameras angled down

on the empty bays of a supermarket car park

and he had been a long time here

washed up by the vagaries of bad decisions

and he was tiresome and landlocked

and no longer the hero of his own story.

 

© Daniel Bennett

 

 

morphrog co-editor Peter Stewart review of Daniel Bennett’s anthology West South North / North South East for the Frogmore Papers. His review is carried below:

Among many fine poems in Daniel Bennett‘s West South North / North South East (The High Window, 2018, £10), Still Life remarks on the featured delicious apples whose “green/will always remind me of pond scum/circulating in islands”. There is a dissonance in the image that takes you out of the frame and into a wider reality of change and mortality. The fruit ends up rotting and fermenting, “sad as broken alcoholics”.

I loved the attention to detail and the complex moods of these poems. Their titles often resonate in subtle ways with the lines that follow. Even the punctuation is carefully chosen. The comma in “Oh I envy you, sometimes” (from These Roots of Implacable Longing) seems deliberate and loaded with nuance. Along with delicacy there is also a vivid directness that pulls the rug from under any commonplace. The triptych poem Three Scent Bottles begins: “Those were the white days of musk/ and paraffin”.

Many of the poems are about places, but, as the quote from Julien Gracq at the front of the book says,  “a vague feeling that location was irrelevant”. Like the title of the volume itself, the poems create a sense of both movement and stasis, of going somewhere and nowhere at the same time.

Peter Stewart