I’ve been a huge admirer of Robert Selby’s Wild Court magazine for a while, so it’s a great moment for me to have three poems featured here. Here’s an excerpt from one of them, ‘Two Days In The Valley’: my paean to a minor nineties film and an out-of-town multiplex.
Two Days in the Valley
Cinema is a kind of drug,
hypnotic, indispensable,
filling the gaps in our lives.
I still recall the trip I made
to another town, to watch
some snarky interplay
of genres: the wisecracks
psychopaths, the charms
of Reseda, the kind of film
the French might regard,
for its perfect Americana.
I was desperate to flee
the last British Sunday
I remember, still at home
starting work, childhood
edging into a grudging
responsibility, as I emerged
from a long dream of
freedom: lovelorn, hopeless,
miserable even to myself.
Read the rest of the poem here.
Absence Club 
Hi Dan. I thoroughly enjoyed these. I think we can all relate to that sense of our current existence ‘in a series of white rooms’ and how deeply we are ostracized from the natural world right now; especially if we live in towns and cities. You can feel the ache of the past in the bones of that first piece. I read a great piece by Patricia Lockwood in the current issue of LRB about Nabakov where he discusses his own idealized past and describes it thus ‘Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die’. There is the same sequence of perfect moments in your ‘Figures’… poem. Do you have an email/contact where I could drop you a line about some potential projects? Cheers.
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Thank you. Glad you enjoyed the work. That poem was written right before all of what has happened, but it’s become charged with a bit more relevance. You can reach me on dt.bennett[at]yahoo.co.uk
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