The website of writer and poet Daniel Bennett
'Nothing changed in the labyrinth of stone. On Earth by this time the sun would have shifted quite a bit, but here the long lunar day held sway, [and] the sun seemed to keep hanging in the very same place, extinguishing the nearest stars, so that it was surrounded y a black void shot through … Continue reading Labyrinth of Stone
'Everyone else thinks it's a dump; a horror show; an asylum. That just serves to keep out the curious. Behind closed doors at the back ends of estates, in crumbling mansions in Clarkson and modern flats on the main street, in solitary bedsits and grim flats above chip shops there are hidden some of the … Continue reading Airdrie
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
Absence Club 