Two Peter Dent Pamphlets
Originally published on my Wordpress Blog a few days ago
Previous, Peter Dent, High Tide Editions, 2025
Hippogryphia: 36 Variables, Peter Dent, treadmill, 2019
Peter Dent’s Previous consists of five titled short prose poem sequences, each of five numbered sections of three lines of text. The poems are made up primarily of oblique observations of the world in a language that is simultaneously hermetic and transparent, or flickering between those two states. Here’s an example, the fourth part of the opening piece, ‘States of Undress’:
No fraternizing with those at the top who keep mouth-to-
mouth records in high duty alloy files marked LATER.
Think freely. Sleep it off in the comfort of your own bed.
No one sentence necessarily leads to the next, and yet, taken as a whole, they cohere as a series of near-impossible imperatives; ‘think freely’ is as reasonable an instruction as ‘don’t think of an elephant’, for instance. But the overall effect is not unlike, say, a condensed version of 1984.
Elsewhere, Dent explicitly draws on distinct genres of storytelling, as in ‘Things Unmeant’, which closes with these lines:
My latest appearance was at the crossroads. Where a man
was hanged for poaching. Willow trees have seen it all.
The fact that I’m sensitive to light means I can’t bear outcomes.
Here Robert Johnson, the Devil, magic, English folk ballads, maybe the Tarot and possibly Norse myth are condensed into the first three sentences, with the apparent non-sequitur of the third actually serving as fair comment on our responses to the first two.
Or the cliched language of politics is introduced and gently subverted:
More redundancies fewer jobs. The whole of the chorus line is
in therapy. It pays to tolerate mosquitoes midges and go the
country mile. Blanket over my head; no peace for the wicked.
(‘Proper Conduct’ part 3)
As with every other section, the final sentence or phrase both comments on and brings together the apparently random conjunctions that precede it.
As a rule, I’m reluctant to review work published more than a year or two ago, so I just want to mention Hippogryphia: 36 Variables and give a quick flavour of the work it contains, 36 prose poems that are, in various ways, like the composite creatures of the title. Here’s one of them for your enjoyment, where even the title is half one thing and half another:
MINT CONDITIONALS
Blackout curtains threadbare? None of us is any younger.
Death is not a ‘flatline’ but a well of unanswered questions
I want nothing to do with. Silence mostly golden.
Cholesterol is to head cook what dynamite is to a deaf aid.
Sectioned (given to the word) she’s happier tearing strips
off legs and mythic monsters than lying in bed.
Dent writes like nobody else I can think of, in a distinctive voice that seems constructed of shards of language from here, there and everywhere else, a mosaic artist creating works that are recognizably his own from fragments of found language. His work is unique, and the very brevity of my review should be seen as an indication of the fact that it is entirely sufficient in itself. This is writing that needs to be read but not written about.
It’s also uniquely hard to find, with neither of these pamphlets apparently available online. If you think you’d be interested in getting a copy of either/both of them, get in touch via the Contact page and I’ll see if I can help.
https://ellipticalmovements.wordpress.com/2026/03/11/two-pamphlets-by-peter-dent/