The website of writer and poet Daniel Bennett
My story 'Vines' has been published by Interzone Digital. The idea for it first came to me about twenty years ago, when I lived in a flat in Brixton, near Brockwell Park. It took me a while, but I eventually found a way to convey some of the strangeness of those days. This is the … Continue reading Vines
‘It was a black dog, though the first thing Diego said was, “It’s a horse.” No sooner did he finish the word, the dog barked, and the bark filled the afternoon and we could have sworn it made the surface of water in the quarry pool tremble a little. It was big as a pony, … Continue reading Savage and Dangerous
‘The description of the law of the maze (which, it was asserted, he had known but also had not known) was simple enough now. It could be a description only if his own emotions concerning the maze; its forced ambiguities had bored him. Its specious and arbitrary manner and its generally meretricious effect had given … Continue reading The Law of the Maze
'They walked together for maybe a quarter kilometre. The bright LED signs beckoned. Brothels and shooting galleries, coffee bars and poetry clubs, casinos and show fights. The air smelled like piss and old food... They walked past a noodle bar. A coffin hotel. A public terminal, its display running a free newsfeed: COMMUNICATIONS PROBLEMS PLAGUE … Continue reading Poetry Clubs
'Tallan indicates I should take my seat again and sits down in a chair across from me. The waiter appears with a bottle of Heineken Supercrisp on a tray. Tallan is given something that looks like iced tea garnished with mint. Then the waiter steps back. He's barely out of sight when I feel the … Continue reading Mobile Island
'The paper's suggested lottery numbers were three, seven, and twelve. Tanks and air power had been deployed against six thousand rebellious Bolivian peasants. An Eskimo had been shot and killed while trying to divert a Boeing 747 to North Korea. A Breton trawler had gone missing with its eleven-man crew. A woman had celebrated her … Continue reading In Full View Of Its Master
My review of Jonathan Davidson's A Commonplace appears on Wild Court 'A sense of place abounds in Jonathan Davidson’s A Commonplace (Smith-Doorstep, 2020), and while that might seem natural from the title, the ‘place’ here derives from a translation of the Latin term ‘locus communis’ or ‘a general or common topic’. Commonplace books were collections of sayings, … Continue reading A Commonplace by Jonathan Davidson
My review of Restless Voices by Alan Price appeared in issue 66 of The Journal. Reading Alan Price's recent book, which includes a sequence of poems using the cut-up method, I was struck by how this form of work offers an almost an inverted experience, in that it is more interesting and rewarding to write than it … Continue reading Restless Voices by Alan Price
My year so far has been caught up with sleep deprivation and illness, an inevitable Covid infection turning the last weeks into a zombie state of dead time, old cartoons and black-and-white films on Youtube. I can't believe half of 2022 has slipped away from me. The early months of the year had also seen … Continue reading Interzone Digital
'The code parlours, the tattoo parlours - all run by one-eyed poets sixty years old, loaded on Carmondy Rose bourbon - the storefront tailor operations and chop joints, their tiny show windows stuffed with animated designs like postage stamps or campaign badges from imaginary wars or bags of innocent coloured candy, were already crowded with … Continue reading Cheap and Tasteless
Absence Club 