Poetry: Peter Bennet's Folly Wood

[Paul Ferguson]

"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."

Review:
https://oceanstatereview.org/2023/08/05/...ted-poems/

Peter reading some of his poems:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7erEpL-jF8