Chapbook RCP31
A6 324 Pages
40 Copies
Badlands of the Real - Peter Dent
The 40 poems of Peter Dent’s Adversaria are 12-line rectangles meticulously aerated by stanza breaks & cesuras, like perfectly balanced abstract paintings, but the contents are more like tree structures: thoughts and images intertwining, branching off, self-interrupting .... Adversaria is an excellent place to sample his work.
Nate Dorward, Ed. The Gig
The title [ Repertory ] may, in the sense of repertory theatre, suggest a wheeling-out of stock-in-trade, going through the motions; nothing could be more wrong. These are perfectly realised, perfectly pitched pieces, pushing and probing beyond the status quo, revealing an artist who is not prepared to decide he has found his ideal form of expression and is content to mark time, tread water, but to move on and find that there is always something that can be added to the repertoire. Something like the exploration implicit in the title of the 2013 Oystercatcher Press pamphlet Private Utopias or ‘Noises in the Head’, the underlying motivation of which is not just or necessarily always the natural world impinging but the cacophony of the language of political and social realities invading private space and needing to be resisted through language.
Catherine Hales, Litter
[ Private Utopias ] .... is wonderfully rich and open poetry, adopting Robert Creeley’s maxim to have more than one event per line. Dent regularly offers one and a half events per line that make the poems zip along in an unpredictable but lucid manner.
David Caddy, Tears in the Fence (blog)
.... you are reminded of W.S. Graham’s pursuit of the sayable, but Dent, asking “what thought thinks about”, is in a curious way both more lucid and more elusive. Or, maybe, of a novelist like Pinget who is simultaneously precise and baffling, although Dent with his “wish to find perfection in the incomplete” gives us recipes for complicity in his search.
Harry Guest, The Fortnightly Review