Carillon Magazine

Reviews from the magazine

Noctua

Author: Peter  Bennet

Shoestring Press. 2004. 28pp.

ISBN 1 90488603 5.  Price £5.00

Reviewer: Gloria Moreno-Castillo

Peter Bennet treads in the same footsteps as Walter de la Mare in the The Listeners, where the mystery, the poetry, is achieved both by what is left unsaid about the traveller, and by the "phantom listeners", something non-real. But in "The Listeners" there is no logical break in the narrative itself, nor does the horse become a hippogriff half way through the poem; yet all this and much more does happen in Peter Bennet's latest booklet.

There is an eerie, ghostly atmosphere in his poems. They seem to be meant to baffle the readers or to stretch their imagination - or both. Even the title is baffling, though there is a drawing of the owl, "Noctua".

The poet gives us hints about his poetics - what he's aiming at - "some are fearful of our agile language / that crouches just beyond their understanding" (p. 5), "All this is difficult to disentangle" (p 4), "We are unlikely to discover" (p.9), "because is baffles all designs / by sudden darkness or by sudden dazzle" (p.21), "Blake I recognise, and Arthur Machen" (p 28).

Now back to Walter de la Mare. A quotation of his opens the booklet, and it seems to point at how the non-real can move us as much as the real - or how effective a mixture of both can be.

I don't want to "murder to dissect" but I must say that the rhythm of the conversational tone, that seems to slow down now and again, is achieved by the perfectly flowing iambic tetrameters and pentameters. There is also internal rhyme, "to crown a head whose only face is bone"; alliteration, "tonight a ship must surely founder"; and assonance, "If not some bobbins and a rocking horse".

All this careful craft goes toward a set of poems where we stretch out our fingertips to grasp at what is going on while dazzled by the beauty of the mist we are lost in.

Issue 12