Roy Bentley

The Wreck of Your Life on the Evening News (a poetic description)The Wreck of Your Life on the Evening News is about what is at the heart of the heroics (and heartache) of being an American. As in "Your nephew saw it-the fatal-car-crash screen footageon the evening news. Complete with footage of the blood-and-brain-spatter, the rest of the mayhem you had caused.He ushered a son away from the TV. Offered a magazine.Mercy was the Playboy opened to distract your kid withbreasts summoning like some kind of roadside signage."The poems about deliverance and other less dire potentialitiesreal and true. Point being if we dare hope, at least that act of faithwill be built on a demanding pursuit of truth and beauty because, besides, you know the rest. The part John Keats reminds us of, where beauty is truth and truth, beauty. Always worth a look.--Roy Bentley

My Mother's Red Ford represents Roy Bentley's first six books, four of which won or distinguished themselves in national competitions. According to Kate Fox, writing of Walking with Eve in the Loved City: "Readers of the Dayton, Ohio native's previous collections--Boy in a Boat, Any One Man, The Trouble with a Short Horse in Montana, and Starlight Taxi--will recognize many of the people and places in Walking with Eve in the Loved City: Bentley's ancestors, Dayton's Comanche Drive, Sonny and Bobby Osborne, Roy's Shell Station, Jupiter, Florida, and Fleming-Neon, Kentucky. All are elevated through the loving crucible of memory and language to divine status.

Walking with Eve in the Loved City is an ambitious collection. Using a variety of male figures—Jeff Goldblum, Ringo Starr, the poet’s uncle Billy, to name a few—these poems skillfully interrogate masculinity and its cultural artifacts, searching for a way to reconcile reverence for the father figure with a crisis of faith about the world as run by men. And yet, despite the gravity of the subjects these poems engage, this is a hopeful, frequently funny book that encourages the reader to look deeply at the world, and then to laugh if she can.Roy Bentley often accomplishes this work through a careful balancing of honesty and misdirection, as when in the poem Can’t Help Falling in Love the real drama of the narrative—the appearance of an affair between the speaker’s father and a drive-in restaurant carhop—operates as a backdrop for the eight-year-old speaker’s puerile attraction to the woman; or when the vampire Nosferatu (a frequent figure in the poems) materializes in a trailer park, his immortality becoming a lens through which to process the speaker’s righteous anger about wealth and poverty.God too features prominently—as does doubt. Drawing from the vernacular of his childhood, Bentley accesses the simultaneous austerity and lyrical opulence of the King James Bible to invent stories in which the last note struck is often a call to pay kinder attention. More than anything, these poems serve as humanistic advocates, using the power of narrative—film, interview, imagination, memoir—to highlight how people matter.Walking with Eve in the Loved City invites the reader to join in this watching and witnessing, to take part in renewing how we see.

Humour, memory, violence, and elegy twine and separate in these peopled, story-filled, beautifully realised poems filled with characters pressing on through all the loss, disappointment, and ordinary confusions of living.

Roy Bentley was a feted international goal scorer. Having served in the Royal Navy during World War Two, Roy became one of the heroes of his generation. Having been part of Newcastle's 'Bank of England' forward line alongside the likes of Jakie Milburn, Roy represented England in the World Cup, and scored a hat trick for his country at Wembley.