The website of writer and poet Daniel Bennett
'The city could not rest. It was destined to move forever, because if it halted it would start the long slow movement down here -- down past-- where it would come, eventually, to the zone where the mountains became ridges a few inches high, where an irresistible pressure would sweep it to its destruction... He … Continue reading Microcosm Of The City
'A man's features, the bone structure and the tissue which covers it, are the product of a biological process; but his face he creates for himself. It is a statement of his habitual emotional attitude; the attitude which his desires need for his fulfilment and which his fears demand for their protection from prying eyes. … Continue reading A Devil Mask
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 … Continue reading Wild Court
I have three poems in the latest issue of The High Window. Here's an excerpt from one of those poems, 'The Tenants', about rootlessness and our attempts to make a life for ourselves. The Tenants They offered us vine leaves and red wineand we approved of their gestureinside the English gardenthey would never share. We … Continue reading The High Window (Autumn)
My poem, 'The Panda', has been published in London Grip's Autumn issue. The sounds of the house begin above him,a family waking. He thinks of Stalin preferring a sofa to a presidential bed, of the ace of pentacles gleaming from the apocrypha of a bookshelf of the bottle of Cahors he drank last night,a black wine, dark as a … Continue reading London Grip Autumn 2020
Very pleased to have a new story 'Captured Dreams of the Dead Machine' in the September issue of Interzone. The story follows a dealer in bootleg information and his encounters in the badlands outside his home city. 'Traffic around the freeport snarled up his journey, but Ash cut down by the skud site near the … Continue reading Interzone 288
Billy watched Manny hurry across the road with a jerking, awkward movement of his cane, finally slowing down and stalking his way back to the barber shop on Coldharbour Lane. Manny turned and he waved again, a strong, sprawling gesture of benevolence and warmth. Billy huddled in his coat as he walked back to Stockwell … Continue reading Who Wants Sweetness?
The artwork for my story in the forthcoming Interzone 288.
I was raised in a small hamlet in the Shropshire countryside. Maybe it was the triumph of electronic media, the doomy news stories of impending nuclear war in the eighties, or all those odd invasion fantasies proliferating on television, but the natural world was never enough for me. A friend and I once conceived of an ideal community, … Continue reading Statement on Poetry
I liked to ride the Docklands railway in those days, sitting at the very front of the electric trains, when they were being driven by an operator at the back. As we zipped around the waterfront of the Thames, following rails set on an overpass of raised concrete, I thought of myself as living in … Continue reading I Liked To Take The Trains
Absence Club 