Her poems combine an astute attention to structure and form, with an often hilarious and daring sense of inventiveness, are chockful of vivid images and turns of phrase, often magical in their originality and conception. Her language is precise, yet flowing, direct, yet ironic, emotional, yet unsentimental, and her deployment of regional border slang, idiom, myth and personal anecdote pay rich dividends. Her subjects range from childhood memory to the travails and joys of motherhood and marriage, from the beauty of the local landscape to the amorous exploits of bees and cockatiels. Trish Bennett’s is a powerful and entertainingly optimistic voice, a humour-charged, irrepressible instrument that urges the reader to ‘crank it up to MAX’ in the face of adversity. A gloves-off, no-nonsense debut collection.
Stench is an ebullient celebration of the human, the domestic and the natural world, an invitation to breathe in the myriad and diverse flavours of the poet’s richly lived life, close to the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, a liminal space never far from her consciousness.
