Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 72
ISBN: 9781854111593
Publication date: September 24, 4000
Price: £5.95
Out of stock
This is a remarkable first collection of poems by Barbara Bentley. Her distinctively witty voice brings us the up-to-date versions of the females of mythology.
‘Noah’s Wife’ is plagued by her DIY-mad, boat-building spouse, ’Waking Beauty’ wakes from a cryogenic sleep into a bizarre future and the ‘Leda’ of the title poem is a deranged neighbour, convinced of a startling dream. Our consumer society and its exhortations to the modern woman to ’have it all’ are scrutinised with considerable flair and irony.
Watch out for ’The Telephone Sonnets’ – a sequence that reveals tales of lust, infidelity, betrayal and revenge, often in the guise of techno-jargon. There are also meditative works on family, friends, childhood memories and brief glimpses of past lives such as ‘Moons’, a short series that subtly illuminates the consequences of a marriage. The reader will find much to admire in this lively and skilful debut.
Barbara Bentley
Barbara Bentley lives with her family in Croft, Warrington. Her prize-winning poetry has been published in a number of journals and anthologies. She completed an M.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Glamorgan before publishing her first collection of poetry, Living Next to Leda (1996), which explores versions of the females of mythology. In addition to her writing career, she has worked as a full-time lecturer in Leigh, Lancashire and as an English teacher and Divisional Manager at St. John Rigby College, Orrell.
Her poetry was nominated for the Cheshire Prize for Literature in 2007.
