A Review of Peter Bennet’s Nayler & Folly Wood: New & Selected Poems
Nayler & Folly Wood: New & Selected Poems, Peter Bennet. Bloodaxe Books, 2023. 256 pages. $24.00
by Daniel A. Rabuzzi
“The Place I Am”: Peter Bennet, Nayler & Folly Wood: New & Selected Poems
Peter Bennet’s poetry evokes a sense of place and history—in this case, Northumberland , where the poet has lived for most of his life—with such ingenious power that it transcends the specific and provides tools to help us think about the concepts of time and space generally. Leading us through the fells, crags, and shores of his beloved county in northeastern England, Bennet demonstrates that the abstract is best grasped through the particular. “A habitat where rare plants learn / to live with salt,” limned by “pewter-coloured horizontals/ that evening sunlight turns to bronze,” the marshy coast outside his door is “the place I am. It should be empty / of any presence otherwise.” Bennet pulls us beyond presumption and any hint of sentimentality in the poem’s second half:
The landscape fades. I fade.
[…]
I’ll jot down where I’d like my body found
but not by whom. […]
The airport glows inland. A homing plane
blinks across the ankles of Orion.
(from “The Place I Am”)
Bennet began as a painter, and did not move to poetry until he was nearly 40, in 1980. Since then, he has had seven collections published, including one short-listed for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and has been a prizewinner in several other major competitions. Nayler & Folly Wood; New & Selected Poems represents the span of Bennet’s output, and is a welcome retrospective especially for readers outside the United Kingdom who may not be familiar with his work. Dana Gioia spoke of “a barrier of a common language,” and Daniel Bourne of “a Mid-Atlantic trench,” when describing the differences between British and American poetry after World War II. Bloodaxe Books, founded in Newcastle in 1978 by current publisher Neil Astley, bucks this trend, building bridges over the putative trench. Bennet’s work should be in conversation with that by American poets such as Marianne Boruch, Natasha Trethewey, Cole Swenson, Vievee Francis, W.S. Merwin, Susan Stewart, Guy Davenport, and Wendell Berry. Reading Bennet may help Americans better see Alice Oswald, Geoffrey Hill, Ian Duhig, and Sally Goldsmith within the rich tradition of English writing about place and the memory of place (place-as-memory?)—and may remind us to re-read Basil Bunting.
Bennet anchors his work in Northumbrian history, providing scholarly endnotes to sketch the lives and deeds he reimagines, e.g., those of the 17th-century Quaker evangelist James Nayler, and of the 15th-century alchemist George Ripley, whose writings propel Bennet’s “Folly Wood” sequence. He quotes from the archival record throughout his historical sequences, with dialogue and commentary by participants forming found poetry and meta-text. The notes include glosses on the many citations in Latin and from the Bible, and discuss the intertextuality of Bennet’s work; for instance, his “Landscape with Psyche” begins with an epigraph from Pierre Corneille (which Paul Valery also used), refers to a Claude Lorraine painting, and includes phrases from Apuleius’ The Golden Ass as retold by Thomas Bulfinch and Walter Pater.
The landscapes Bennet describes are deeply observed, and lived in; I felt reading these as if I were accompanying the poet on his hikes to the Wanney Crags (“stone-shouldered and unkindly twins”), Hareshaw Linn (“crockery of cliffs”), and the Duddo Stones. We encounter a “sheep-wracked hill,” a “lichened balustrade,” “the top clump of a scoured copse, / acoustic,” “hills where winds are sharp and several, / tooth-houses, hollow to the root,” “the yew tree…a flame’s / dark opposite.” The words belong to this country: “scran,” “lough,” “blood-scumbled,” “two heather-brakes,” “bones / of whinstone in a bleating mist,” “a skelp of land to feed one sheep,” “the cuddy’s jawbone,” “a salt-bleached stile,” “aftermath, foggage, and bullimong.” Species are specified, whether curlews or “the elder by the gate,” a sea holly bush, “stalk-stiff bulrushes,” dock, vetch, barley, rosebay willowherb. Always he gives us the deep slow rhythm of a country where human actions have weathered the terrain as much as the wind has:
Drystone dikes beside the path
rise again among the nettles,
and deeply fumbling ruts reveal
the old highroad across the Rede,
broad enough for carts to pass, or haul
harvest towers, two abreast.
(from “The Long Pack”)
Yet, Bennet’s Northumberland isn’t what it seems. He layers folklore and fantasy over the physicality of rock and tree, dancing between various pasts and unreliable presents, toggling to great effect between registers, all to emphasize the quintessential liminality of the place– Northumberland has been a contested borderland throughout its history, between Scotland and England, between England and the Danelaw, between Roman and Celt. (American readers may resonate to the underlying sensations Bennet conjures, as vehicles mutatis mutandis for our understanding of places in the Old South and along the current Mexican border.) Grafted across the crunch of the Germanic root-words are countless Latinate borrowings, juxtapositions to question the nature of rootedness. “The meadows are incarnadine about the ferme ornée,” in “Folly Wood, may stand for many, referring to the interplay between French and English garden traditions, which Bennet further alludes to with a nod to William Shenstone (which allows him to quote Samuel Johnson as well). The bleak Northumbrian hillsides echo to the cries of Erato, Calliope, Tithonus, nymphs, a possible hippogriff, Iole, Hebe, Ceres, and others from the Mediterranean pantheon. Also strewn across the seemingly immutable weight of the place are numerous casual references to modern conveniences: a rucksack named by its brand, dungarees, spaghetti carbonara, an Oxfam jumper, a duck-down duvet, flashbulbs, chainsaws, telephones.
With all these artful discrepancies, Bennet imbues Northumberland with a living presence straddling more than one world. The common becomes the numinous (with Blakean and Yeatsian intensity):
A company of white geese by the stream,
down where the lane goes through a farmyard
overhung and dark with oaks,
are moonlit so that they resemble
excisions from an older, radiant world.
(from “Fairytale”)
The normal trembles, slips away: “a calf / takes fright in its familiar haining.” The landscape has a mind of its own: “blue hills, remembering to be / Roxburghshire,” “the secret of the storm-shot rowan,” “the ocean acting blue for us.” Among the coke-works, railway shuntings, and greasy cafes of an industrial town “are the fleet of foot, / the armoured and the many-headed.”
Bennet, whose body of work is superbly curated in Bloodaxe’s Nayler & Folly Wood retrospective, deserves a wide audience in the Americas. His fierce attention to the local opens out into the universal. He dedicates the collection to the “Wilds o’ Wanney,” a term used by Tynesiders about Northumberland’s rural regions, and to Newcastle’s medieval Morden Tower, since 1964 an important venue for poetry readings (an equivalent to, say, NYC’s Nuyorican Poets Cafe or Poetry Project at St. Mark’s). While naturally championing Northumbrian poets, the Morden Tower readings have long hosted American authors. Bennet embodies the Morden Tower ethos; his work, authentically of the place it honors, has much to offer American readers.
Daniel A. Rabuzzi (he / his) has had two novels, five short stories, 30 poems, and nearly 50 essays / articles published (www.danielarabuzzi.com). He lived eight years in Norway, Germany and France. He earned degrees in the study of folklore & mythology and European history. He lives in New York City with his artistic partner & spouse, the woodcarver Deborah A. Mills (www.deborahmillswoodcarving.com).