Peat and Other Soils, Brandon Bennett

Grief. Fatherhood. Faith. Peat and Other Soils explores all three of these. This inaugural pamphlet from Brandon T. Bennett is the result of two years worth of writing and extensive edits.

 

Set largely in the Lindow Moss (either literally or psychologically), an ancient area of peat bogs located in Wilmslow, the North of England, these poems are dark, raw, reflective, and deceptively hopeful.

 

 

 

"Soil, mud, ditches, peat, fathers, alcohol. Brandon Bennett’s Peat and Other Soils excavates patrilineal trauma and considers what it means to be an embodied male capable of repeating toxic behaviours. There is an air of Seamus Heaney and Gregory Corso throughout; tone and scenery are damp, soused even, ready to be set alight. Bennett’s spaceless phrasemaking is shimmering and pained: ‘sungushing’; ‘fatherleaning’; ‘strippedbackgums’; the speaker moored on the broads catching ‘thisbarelyfish’. Peat and Other Soils introduces readers to a striking new voice in northern poetry, a collection in which time is forever stuck, ‘watch[ing] the light ripple through his pint on the wood’."

[With thanks to Tom Branfoot for writing this blurb above]

 

 

 

A Note on ‘Peat and Other Soils’ by Brandon Bennett

As I write this, the skeleton of a bonsai sits like a sombre monument on my windowsill and the first moments of summer enact a forceful play on the world outside. With that being said, I will try to keep this as neat as possible.

 

Peat and Other Soils was written across two years, with one poem spanning five. In those two years my second son, Spencer, was born and my father, Roger, died. These poems explore masculinity, fatherhood, faith, and grief - many of which exist on the backdrop of the Lindow Moss in Wilmslow, the Peat Bogs my father and I grew up on and around. Lindow men through and through.

 

There are people I must thank. Rebecca, my fiancé and the mother of my children, for your belief and grounding. Will Barnard for your unwavering honesty and kinship. Kaolan O’Connor and Joe Simpson for your stalwart friendship. Tom Branfoot, I thank you for your patient edits. And, of course, my late father – a man to whom many of these poems are directed. Despite our often-rocky relationship, your alcoholism, I would like it to be made clear that above all the anger and frustration there was a deep love and desire for some kind of salvation,
redemption. It is only fair I dedicate this pamphlet, this small collection of words, to you. I can only hope you’ve found your peace.