Peter Bennet was for many years a well-kept poetic secret, known mostly to his admirers in his adopted northeast. With Goblin Lawn: New and Selected Poems (2005) he began to receive wider attention, and The Glass Swarm should ensure that a new audience will encounter this gifted and original poet, who is currently producing his best work.

Living in the Northumberland borders on the Wild Hills o'Wanney, in the Debatable Lands (the area roamed by innumerable armies, cattle rustlers and ballad makers), Bennet has been mining a rich seam in which history, legend and a profound and haunted sense of place are mingled as time folds over on itself. In recent years, he has developed intricately and brilliantly improvised rhyming, both in longer forms and in narrative sonnets. The sonnets typify the gleeful unease of his work. A dead lover returns dripping from the sea: “Your darkening footprints on the wet sand shrink/to dimples and your hotel bed/feels the tide shift and begins to sink/while I am downstairs at the desk already,/insistent, and the worse for drink.”

It is sometimes hard to tell the comedy from the horror, the gloom from its exuberant depiction, the eerie anecdote from “the real thing”. Bennet's hauntings arise partly from books, and even take place inside them. The protagonist of the poem Cuneiform, spending the night in a haunted library, finds himself “shrinking/to be pursued through folios of winters” by the crows shown on the wallpaper. Or “We're in a version of the Feast of Guilt,/where consequences eat intention.” The stories of MR James and Robert Louis Stevenson are close to hand, for instance in the motif of forbidden but irresistible knowledge, and Bennet clearly draws on late Romantic poets such as Walter de la Mare and Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, the author of the famous shocker, Flannan Isle, with its mysteriously abandoned lighthouse and sinister birds. Yet The Glass Swarm is a work neither of pastiche nor nostalgia. Nor is its reading of England sentimental. Its phantoms have force and, as it were, solidity, and Bennet is also able to register a complex earthly sorrow. In The Naturalist, a Victorian clergyman writes to his unbelieving and probably Darwinist son: “I wonder if, when one decides to free/oneself from something - duty, or a place -/you've noticed that a pause occurs/sufficient to allow the future/to squeeze into a smaller space?/Sometimes, I think, such pauses last forever.”

A novelist would envy this tactful exposure of reticence, and of the father's exhaustion and doubt, and a poet will note the way that the apparently casual musing acquires an epigrammatic weight. Thus one is drawn in by the rich dramatic life of Bennet's poems, whether comic or nightmarish, such as The Stitchers or The Restaurant. There is also room for a titled English fascist lady to damn herself out of her own mouth, as she inherits the family estate in 1939: “My name is Greta,/inventor of the ergonomic kitchen,// ambassadress of function and of beauty,/perfectibility, in sisterhood,/of social structures, human spirit,//and purity of race and blood./Don't drop me.”

The delight in invention is given its head in the 13-part Folly Wood, deriving from the writings of the 15th-century alchemist George Ripley. It is a grotesque comedy of transformation in which nothing is as it appears and everything is much more significant than any sane observer would allow, and where the alchemist-narrator has convinced himself, at any rate, that he knows what is happening and can control it: “Our privilege is work, advancing/philosophy towards the dark/of which the edge of brightness is a trap/we shall avoid, now we can trace/the root of tinctures to a dormant spark./Do not be eager for success.”

The analogy with the poet's role is irresistible, though of course Bennet really does know, very precisely, how to contrive the entry of the powers of place and history into his poems without depriving them of idiosyncrasy, surprise or their darker natures.

The Glass Swarm by Peter Bennet
Flambard £7.50 pp72

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