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 Am
10 The Riddle
11 Miss Hood in the Nursing Home
12 Old Fashioned
13 Auberge
14 The Unsafe Landing
15 Tales of Tesco
16 Boustrophedon Lang Syne
18 The Comfort Service
19 The Leopard
20 The Laboratory
21 La Morale de Joujou
22 A Helpmeet for Protestant Mystics
23 The Muse and the Fridge
24 The Heiress
25 Like Me
26 Three of Us
27 Listening to Bees
28 The Old Stacks
29 The Better Place
30 After Dark at Lindisfarne Castle
31 Gantries
32 The Magic Castle
33 The Unicorn
34 Remission

35 LANDSCAPE WITH PSYCHE

42 The Turtle Holiday
43 Proxy
44 Next Time
45 The Winpole Boy
46 After Pevsner
47 The Nuisances
48 Pastoral
49 The Ornithologist
50 Resting Rats
51 Virgil
52 French Windows
53 The Philosopher
54 Barefooted
55 The Trouser Button
56 Sanquar

57 LADDEREDGE AND COTISLEA

67 The Gypsy Fiddle
68 The Columns
69 The Vapour Trail
70 An Exhibition Catalogue
71 Death and the Spinster
72 The Cormorant
73 Seasons
74 News of a Death
75 My Mother at Erbistock
76 A Piano in Hobart

79 Notes