The Glass Swarm By Peter Bennet
Posted at 10:36AM Tuesday 30 Dec 2008
The Glass Swarm
ISBN: 9781873226995
Peter Bennet's handling of folklore, his watchful, thicketed landscapes, the stateliness of his language - all fit themselves perfectly to winter. While the sun's glare might diminish poems in which "goblins chuckle" and "hills ... shed darkness from their stature / beyond the graveyard", their impact swells as nights draw in and days turn colder. This is fireside poetry. In this TS Eliot prize-shortlisted collection, he considers the moments of interaction between past and present, fairytale and fact, using folklore's staples to cast fresh light on contemporary concerns (the entrepreneur reimagined as a knight-errant on a quest to "smooth the feathers of [his] auditors" is an especially timely example). This fondness for masks makes the occasional moments when he lays them aside and speaks directly all the more affecting. But in the end it's the eerie, chilly atmosphere that beguiles
Guardian review
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