The website of writer and poet Daniel Bennett
'In the darkness, in among the barely visible vegetation, the fireflies shone. I hate when people call them lightning bugs; firefly is a beautiful word. Once, I caught a bunch of them in an empty mayonnaise jar, and I realised how ugly they really are, like cockroaches with wings. But they've been blessed with the … Continue reading Things We Lost In The Fire
Last night I dreamed of the Frostman again. I sat at a bank of desks in an open-plan office, talking to someone seated next to me. We had been making a joke, when the Frostman appeared: a pale, disheveled man, white stubble washing along his cheek like mica dust. He wore a long white cat, … Continue reading The Frostman
As we boarded the train, I noticed the white of a dog collar under the man's scarf. Yet moments earlier, I had watched as he stood at the centre of the doors, impeding the passengers who needed to alight from the train. We sat down at the same bank of seats, and during our short … Continue reading Cloth
The paintings of R.B. Kitaj will always been twinned in my mind with the poetry of Lee Harwood, for the rather basic reason that the cover of the Paladin edition of Harwood's Crossing the Frozen River included a detail from Kitaj's 'A Study For The World's Body'. I brought that Lee Harwood book with me … Continue reading R.B. Kitaj
I've spent the summer looking over old work, returning to a past self and his observations, reclaiming the writing from his caprices. In those years, I wrote in a white hot state, as though a clock were ticking, and I had to beat it. It was hardly sustainable; it was hardly writing, really, more of … Continue reading Lemon Meringue Pie
Drive to the junkyard,to check out the weather beating into ironwork,the torsion of steel. Or swing by the dealerof aggregate and masonry, blue quartz and white limeare drifting pyramids on the concrete forecourt,where a seashell is astray from the channel bed.A house is all that remains. Pass the wall by the railway,where nettles sway in … Continue reading Lowly
A short film of a long poem, from my collection West South North, North South East https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOd_7UzoRfE Buy the book here.
‘We all walk over bones in this city, it’s just a question of making holes deep enough to reach the buried dead. I have to dig, with a shovel, with my hands, like a dog. Dogs always find bones; they always know where they’re hidden, where they’ve been abandoned, forgotten.’ ‘No Flesh Over Our Bones,’ … Continue reading Bones
'I have to guess where I am in relation to the hawk.' The Peregrine, J.A. Baker
'Vorster watched the paraplegics racing their wheelchairs around the basketball field. Two years earlier, while driving home one evening, he had seen Cosmos 253 breaking up on re-entry. For half a minute the sky had been filled with hundreds of glowing fragments, like an immense air force on fire. Vorster stood up as the audience … Continue reading Particle Physics
Absence Club 