With this collection, Bennett returns to his earlier topic of loss. Loss of time, opportunity, loved ones, and of life itself. A life reduced to memorial names or tags on museum exhibits.
Loss includes loneliness on a subway ride, posessions melted in a fire, life long love turning a slow corner. Keeping an unusual pet solely for company.
There is comic relief, and some pleasant experiences, capturing the small things that make us human and able to cope and even look forward.
You will meet faces. Maybe your own, disguising motives. Maybe another, full of undiguised rage in a public place.
Poetry is about experience. Not all of these will be gentle, but you will share what Bennett has captured for you.
Jim writes poetry. He has degrees from UofT in pure mathematics, and worked in data processing, claiming the title of Mister Systems Architect at one time. Not your usual suspect for poetry, eh? Jim knew he was going to write, and from about age sixteen. He also knew that he wanted a real life, and poetry was not going to fund one. Thus the intent to become a math professor, and instead becoming an application developer. There are currently seven poetry books available on Lulu and Amazon. Jim also does Amazon Kindle Book Reviews, and is sometimes the only listed reviewer of poetry. Jim's philosophy of life is complicated, a mess actually. His starting point was Shroedinger's book title, What is Life? Then Joseph Campbell and Bruce Feiler. Then the Koran, in two English translations. Jim claims to be an atheist, and then writes poems like Galapagos Search, where he speaks directly to God, finding no answer ... or does he? What does Quantum Mechanics, the uncertainty principle, and chaos theory combine to make possible? Intelligence. So expect the odd bit of weirdness in Jim's poetry, and expect an experience.
It is hard to review poetry. It wells up from the Poet’s own emotions; and who is to evaluate those when the resulting words are so visceral.
I have read and very much appreciated Jim Bennett’s six prior books, but his “Seven” – to me – is perhaps the most contemplative - no, evocative.
In “Seven,” the Canadian poet’s first offering, “Lost April,” immediately grabbed a hold of me with its personal message. How did he know?
Bennett’s poems do not rhyme; they don’t gurgle along pleasantly. Instead, they rush you over your own emotional boulders, suck you into the depths of your mind’s whirlpools, then fling you out over the great falls of dread as they tell us that our own “Dates with Stones” are closing in on us.
“Seven” will stay on my nightstand, to be read during those hours when sleep escapes; but in the morning, it makes me want to be kinder, to be more alert, to be more ALIVE.