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Largo
Paul Bentley
£5
978-1-906613-37-2
A winner in the Book & Pamphlet Competition 2010
Paul Bentley was born in Rotherham, and now lives in Cornwall with his wife and two children. He teaches English Literature in Plymouth. Paul's poems have appeared in Poetry Review, The Rialto, The Manhattan Review, and other magazines. 'Barnsley Abu (a postcard to Paul Mundoon)' was a joint runner-up for the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize. He is currently working on a book for Continuum, Ted Hughes, Class and Violence.
'A remarkable, technically sophisticated blend of parody and elegy, personally felt poems interwoven with popular culture, party politics and history both naturaland unnatural. Mischievous and moving.' — Simon Armitage
'Very knowing... concerned with the social, political and footballing life of the North, a fine broth of lowbrow and highbrow people, names and enthusiasms.' — Peter Porter, Poetry Review
The most ambitious of [the 2010 Competition winning] pamphlets is Largo by Rotherham-born Paul Bentley. It is dominated by two long poems, ‘Barnsley Abu’ about the tribal loyalties of South Yorkshire football fans, and ‘The Two Magicians’, an extraordinary sequence about the Miners’ Strike. Reminiscent at times of Geoffrey Hill and early work by Peter Reading, ‘The Two Magicians’ is about growing up in South Yorkshire in the early 1980s, an epic of Medieval warfare sung to a sound-track by The Smiths and The Fall:
‘A window cracks from side to side – / Scab! Scab! Scab! Scab!.. The chant repeated, night after / night after night. The enemy within / the enemy within... The mirror cracked from side to side. / Daylight breaking. / Cars swerving from side to side / across the M18. / Flashing lights. / A council site / down a side- / road – a shower of stones, grit. // Dark shards. Splinters... Ghost lights. Revenants. / On the central reservation / men gathered together. / In the bearded barley.’
The poem keeps cutting forward to the aftermath of the strike, to the emigrations, the heroin and the suicides. ‘Nothing to do now but go fishing. / Sign on/. Take the dogs out. Get stoned... All hath suffered change. The cages are still. / The pit wheel sunk in the ground / down the High Street, a war memorial.’
— Andy Croft, Morning Star
