SKY-RIDING
Poems by Peter Bennet

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Peter Bennet was born at Ladderedge, near Leek, Staffordshire, in 1942. He was educated at King’s School, Macclesfield, and later studied at Manchester College of Art and at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne.

After leaving teaching in 1978 he worked as a painter and printmaker before becoming committed to writing. Since then his poems have appeared in several magazines and, with those of Rosemary Scott and Dave Stagg, in the Mandeville Press pamphlet First Impressions. He was a prizewinner in the National Poetry Competition 1981 and in the Sotheby’s (Arvon) International Poetry Competition 1982.

He has worked as a part-time tutor for the Open University, and in Newcastle, where he has helped to organise poetry readings at the Morden Tower, and a remote cottage in Northumberland which was once the home of the nineteenth-century ballad-writer James Armstrong.

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Barmaid

Floundering in her pool of faces,
with scarcely chance to scratch an itch,
she dips her head, gulps privacy,
bobs among the pin-up bitches’

buoyant bubs as pink as scampi,
which bring strange fishes looming down.
Glances like the lips of lampreys
are lifting flesh on all her bones.

Despite her aches she twirls to serve
but thoughtlessly displays a thigh.
In frothy swirls the blunt snouts swerve
and every glass contains an eye.

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SKY-RIDING
Price £7.95 per copy post free (£5.30 post free to Associate Members)
Cover drawing: by Paul Stangroom from LYC Gallery publication Wall. It belongs to Roger Garfitt, by whose kind permission it is reproduced.
Publication: 1984 (60 pages laminated paperback)