Thaw

When a thunderstorm's dark reverberations glimmer 'in the night-sky of the head', or when apricots generate an edible appreciation of 'soft time', we discover Charles Bennet's lyrical and powerful poems revealing the impact of nature in memorable, unexpected and sometimes unusual ways.

This fascinating collection concerns itself with forms of melting: fluid interfaces between natural and human environments. Beginning and ending in gardens, it explores aspects of experience informed and affected by close observation. Time and again, whether in the form of a blackbird's tuneful message, a seashell's glossy interior, or the smell of fresh rain, our relationship with ecology is reinvigorated. Delighted, rapturous and occasionally disturbing, this is a collection enthralled by the sensual delights of the natural world and its creatures.

"'should we / have been listening more / and listening harder?' Charles Bennett wonders in 'Planting Apricots'.

But it's difficult to imagine poems that listen more closely than these to the 'green music' of the natural world.

At play is a sensibility which - alert to happenstance and to the lives of plants and creatures - willingly finds a common ground that furnishes moments of quiet transcendence.

The vivid precision of the image-making attests to the thoughtful rigour of this poet's attention.

A sow was never before 'like a lake of treacle' but will always be so now."

Katharine Towers

Author: Charles Bennett
Publisher: Fair Acre Press
Published: 09/13/2018
Pages: 36
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.15lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.10d
ISBN: 9781911048336

About the Author
Bennett, Charles: - CHARLES BENNETT is widely acclaimed. Evenlode, his ninth collection, cemented his reputation as a lyrical landscape poet of depth and passion. Together with his intriguing new pamphlet Thaw and the ground-breaking 2019 collection Cloud River, he demonstrates gifts of vivid imagery and a deeply musical imagination. His work with choral composer Bob Chilcott has seen him hailed as a memorable and mesmerising librettist. He is writer-in-residence at Wicken Fen and combines this with his duties at the University of Northampton where he leads the BA in Creative Writing. He lives on the edge of Northamptonshire and Leicestershire with his wife, daughter and Labrador. Brimming over with startling voices, arresting images and an indefatigable joie de vivre. Poetry Book SocietyCarry, Ackroyd: - A painter and printmaker, Carry has lived most of her life in rural East Northamptonshire. Her interest in the landscape draws on many levels of fascination: history mainly, also geology, botany and wildlife. She is drawn to the nature of the unlabelled countryside trying to survive alongside agribusiness. Carry walks around whichever area is of current interest to her, accumulating sketches and visual notes, trying to take in all sorts of information which, later in the studio, are distilled into the final image. Carry enjoys working in different media; a subject will sometimes demand to be treated in a certain way or go through many processes. The use of colour is instinctive. Sometimes it just has to be pink. Carry is also a 'John Clare nut', and over the last 8 years has produced a series of images relating to the work of the 'Peasant Poet'. Recently she was commissioned by the John Clare Society to illustrate a new paperback selection of his poems, The Wood is Sweet, for which she made over 50 linocuts.

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