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.
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