All the Filthy Magic: Daniel Bennett

In West South North North South East (The High Window, 2018), Daniel Bennett's city, his London, always feels as though seen on foot, a fraction or slower than its frantic inhabitants, like playing an audio book at 0.95 speed. It's as though he always 'walks softly there,' as Roethke might say. 

The tone in these tender and highly absorbing poems is of seeing with a profound toughness and gentleness. Seeing just about everything, the past overlaid in the present. Leicester Square, Camden, Bermondsey, Spitalfields are namechecked and we walk through him, but every place achieves its texture and suchness. 

He calls the first section of the book 'Lorca in London' and what Bennett manages to transmit of the great Spanish poet is a sense of shadow upon shadow: 'Dry seeds/ tick on grey slabs. Quick roots/sneak ingress into gaps and flaws,/permeate concrete' ('Rewilding'). Landscapes full of their own shadows, and the people, in Soho, for instance, trapped like caged birds:  'when the shops sold Bakelite radios and peacock feathers/and women called to you, trapped in their booths.'  There is 'dirty cardboard' set against 'Lilacs sprouting beneath our doorsteps' set against a mythical 'ex member of The Fall.' ('Back With the Boys'). All the filthy magic of the capital.

The images reveal a painter's eye, but there is also a sense of compressed conversations and a real delight at all the human oddity, eccentricity and mess: 'Bleached paper./  Porn in bracken. Broken glass' ('Lowly').  There are non-urban poems in this collection ('My Father Dreams of the Sea' and 'Snowdonia are elegant examples) but the urban ones are the real powerhouse of the book. 

'Bermondsey Spaces' is a good example of a poem where the observation is acute and compassionate, from 'the man eating ribs from a paper bag' on a Shell forecourt at the poem's opening to the 'sudden space between houses' in the last line there is a sense of the city's men who posture and blag their way through the poem, always barely covering an inner emptiness-- behaviour which Bennett absorbs and reflects with a keen and always empathic eye. These poems dance smoothly with and between the past (especially the eighties) and the wreckage of now always with clear-headedness, deftness and balance, looking back by looking in. 

 


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