Communing

by Ben Banyard

Communing focuses on our relationships with family, birth, life, love, loss and place. It is an intensely personal collection shot through with flashes of gentle humour. It is the author’s debut pamphlet.

“Ben Banyard’s impressive debut is notable for the way it not only documents a particular stage in the poet’s life, the loss of his mother, the birth of his children, but also succeeds in transforming these experiences and making them universal. Reading it I had a strong, disquieting sense of the fragility of life and of its beauty. A lovely book” - Carole Bromley.

“Ben Banyard conveys his themes of familial loss and remembrance through beautifully observed domestic details. These familiar moments, like the old telephone number that you never forget, connect us to our own experience” - Rachael Clyne.

Ben Banyard lives and writes in Portishead. His poems have appeared in Popshot, The Interpreter’s House, Prole, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Broadsheet, Sarasvati, The Dawntreader, London Grip, The Open Mouse and many others. Communing is his debut pamphlet. Ben edits Clear Poetry, a blog of accessible contemporary work by newcomers and old hands alike.

Genres: Poetry

28 pages, Paperback

Published February 19, 2016

About the author

Ben Banyard lives in Portishead, UK, where he writes poetry and short fiction. His work has appeared widely in print and online journals. His debut poetry pamphlet, Communing, was published by Indigo Dreams in February 2016, and his first full collection, We Are All Lucky, arrived in March 2018. Ben's latest collection, Hi-Viz, was published by Yaffle Press in November 2021.

Ben was previously the editor of the online journal Clear Poetry.

He blogs and shares mixtapes at https://benbanyard.wordpress.com

Reviews

[Deborah · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Communing’ is Ben Banyard’s debut pamphlet from Indigo Dreams Publishing, and it signals a fresh, original talent. Banyard’s poems are well-observed, pointed but never sly, honest but never unkind. The characters who people his poems, whether they are relatives, strangers in pubs, a neighbour and the foxes that share his garden, or a pigeon scouring the pavement outside Greggs, are clearly drawn, as are remembered rituals such as the dialling of a number on an old-fashioned telephone or the spooling of film in a pre-digital camera, giving his writing a palpable sense of the passing of seasons and years, the death of the older generation, the birth of a new.

I am only giving it four stars instead of five because I know he’s only going to get better and better, and a reviewer needs to have somewhere to go.