Border

Peter Bennet was born in Staffordshire in 1942. He went as a scholarship boy to King's School Macclesfield, and then to Manchester College of Art and Design, where he was influenced by Norman Adams and his wife, the poet Anna Adams. He taught in secondary and further education, including work with redundant steelworkers following the closure of Consett Steel Works, and spent sixteen years as Tutor Organiser for Northumberland with the Workers' Educational Association. He gave up painting for writing in 1980 and did a part-time MA at Newcastle University, including a study of W.S.Graham. His Bloodaxe retrospective Border: New & Selected Poems (2013) includes work from books including Goblin Lawn (2005), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, The Glass Swarm (2008), a Poetry Book Society Choice which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and A Game of Bear (2011), all published by Flambard Press, and features his four major sequences, The Long Pack, Jigger Nods, Folly Wood and Bobby Bendick's Ride, as well as a selection of new poems. His latest collection, Mischief, was published by Bloodaxe in 2018. He has received major awards from New Writing North and Arts Council England and been a prizewinner in the National and the Arvon International Poetry Competitions, and in the Basil Bunting Awards. He lived for thirty-three years near the Wild Hills o'Wanney in Northumberland, in a cottage associated with the ballad writer James Armstrong, author of Wannie Blossoms. He now lives in Whitley Bay.

'Verbal panache that borders on the dandyish; conventional stanzas, predominantly iambic metre and occasional or elusive rhymes lend a misleadingly reassuring air to a poetry that is full of bold imaginative strokes, subversive connections and dark wit.' - Poetry Book Society Bulletin. 'But such is Bennet's way: in his world nothing is ever simple, and he tells us so with a linguistic inventiveness and panache that are rare in contemporary verse.' - Times Literary Supplement. 'Peter Bennet's supple and musically precise poems are charged with a sense of the uncanny, whether their subject is history, art or myth. Droll, frightening, crackling with an unmistakable intelligence and intensity of utterance, these poems consolidate and extend the achievement of one of the country's most exciting poets.' - Jacob Polley.