Books

Review by Francis Sheppard

Lee Benson’s verse is charming, disarming and meaningful. An artist and professional communicator through broadcasting, as well as a prolific fictional writer, the engagement with the reader comes naturally, and naturally too the truths that he imparts.

The collection contains topics and views that range from seaside to wildlife, lifestyle, technology, untimely death, death of beloved fellow artists, love itself and to bad sexual relations. The observations are always witty, often humorous, frequently comic. Benson is a gifted rhymer; the final couplet is used to effect. Jottings and Scribbles is also a well-produced volume – paperback bound in good stiff card, with heavy papers. It is joyful in its impact on readers and therefor makes an ideal gift.

Two poems interested me particularly and led me to the view that Benson is much more than a versifier. These were Watch the World Go By and Time.

The first has a typically jocular beginning –

It takes a lot of strength

It takes a lot of balls

It takes a conscious effort

To do nothing.

As a former subscriber to The Idler, a publication that positions ‘idleness’ and contemplation over work-ethic, to me the sentiment is apt. Yet Benson qualifies it as the poem progresses.

It takes the leaf without the tree

It takes an ear without a tune

It takes it all without a word

To do nothing.

Though stepping back from activity, from involvement in the world may be a bold choice, and lead to new perceptions that follow on from ‘the hand off the remote control’ – we are nonetheless not made to be like that, and to be so is to disengage from humanity.

We all look away

As we watch the world go by.

Benson has presented us with the choice, to be onlooker or activist. His imagery illustrates the gravity of that choice.

This ambiguity of meaning he exercises again in Time, when the speaker awakes in ‘the sweat of fear’ against a background of environmental disaster, though the effect is the ever-present existential dread, of death.

So Benson dives deep. The fluency of the utterance I enjoyed, but I did wish for a variation of tone, of voice. And further, aren’t we poets supposed to be breaking-up and re-assembling language, in new dynamic forms? Gifted artificer though he has shown himself to be in this writing, I sense there is much more to come from Lee Benson, poet.