Just Another Day in Just Our Town

by Bruce Bennett

Bruce Bennett's first collection of New and Selected Poems, Navigating The Distances, published by Orchises Press, was cited by Booklist as One Of The Top Ten Poetry Books Of 1999. Orchises has now brought out his second New and Selected.

Although Just Another Day in Just Our Town includes poems from several of Bennett's books and chapbooks written since 2000, the book is not a conventional New and Selected. A large number of the poems have not been previously published, and many of them are very recent. Just Another Day is organized into sections, which invite the reader to journey with the author from the quotidian and local into a darker interior landscape that opens into a kind of free-wheeling Alice In Wonderland literary tour, followed by a suite of villanelles which act out a pas de deux with the villanelle form. The concluding sections are more personal, focusing on questions of identity and vocation rendered all the more urgent by the encroachment of intimations of mortality.

In quoting Borges as a preface to both books, Bennett implies that the personal journey of self-discovery they document resembles everyone's personal journey. And it is clear throughout this new collection that the continuous play with form, narrative, voice, and character is Robert Frost's "serious play." It may be just another day in just our town, but it is a day with everything in it, and it is no more ordinary than our extraordinary lives.

214 pages, Paperback

Published January 27, 2017

Reviews

[Jackie Craven · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had the joy and honor of reading an advance copy of Bruce Bennett’s new collection, Just Another Day in Just Our Town . The book begins with a prescient choice: “Indian John” is a deceptively simple description of injustices endured by a Native American who lived and died an outsider. Here, as in many of Bennett’s poems, remorse is softened with self-deprecatory wit. From playful clerihews to complex villanelles, Bennett is a master of form, and his metered verse often becomes a vehicle for gentle satire. The title poem, “Just Another Day in Just Our Town” weaves rhyming lines and a refrain — "The people who were going to die have died" — into a lyric lamentation that is both comic and poignant. Classic works by Marlowe, Poe, Tennyson, Dickinson, and other poets are recast as mock heroic narratives of townspeople who take themselves too seriously. (“I dwell in Gullibility— / A fairer House than Doubt”) A series of persona poems creates a chorus of homespun voices who, like the speakers in Spoon River Anthology (Edgar Lee Masters), elevate ordinary to the sublime…but always with a delightful sense of play. Bruce Bennett is the author of many chapbooks and collections. Just Another Day in Just Our Town combines decades of work with new and never published poems.

[fara · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was going to write a long review about how I almost gave this 1 star but changed my mind. I felt rage but now it’s all clear skies and still water, and in this state of mind I’m unable to say anything negative, maybe the most negative I can be is to state that I didn’t like this book - which is true. The poems that I did like are named ‘My Time Here’ and ‘Walking an Old Dog’.
That is all I can say about the contents of the book. But I will always feel nostalgic about the time when I found it lying next to a supermarket during my exchange program at Bard College in 2020. Yes, I only read it now, I don’t know why I waited so long.