Scott Bentley
The Occasional Tables
ISBN 1-930068-07-8
$10.00

This book was one of four to receive a grant from the Greenwall fund of The Academy of American Poets. Bentley lives in Oakland, CA, and teaches writing at Cal State Hayward, negotiating the East Bay hills in his wheelchair. His work has appeared in a number of small magazines, as well as three chapbooks. The Occasional Tables is a collection of lyric poems written over the past decade. Each poem is written to a specific person for a specific event. Some of the poems stand alone and some are written as discrete series. Yet taken as a whole, "they resonate in a complex way to the poetical as a worldly category, obligated to personal and political unease as well as pleasure. The book is, in this sense, full of life." (Lyn Hejinian)

Or as Alex Cory remarks:

"I'd have called this an 'important' book, except in its wake importance doesn't count for anything. All that could possibly count is writing a poem for someone you care about, and if it could stand up to that, be useful, like these poems by Scott Bentley, poems that need to personally operate in the midst of a life, in the midst of a marriage-- a real love poem, written for someone, for Marta, to make poetry become capable of that, of making so small, and so actual, of a gesture . . ."

"Scott Bentley is loud and clear and on fire cumulatively. Now we all get to sit down together at the eating table of language occasions. Bentley's abstract menu begins with a poem containing some of the most phonemetrically erotic phrases ever invented. What better way for a poem to be but for somebody. Grammar flutters & fucks in the dust 'beyond a yell of water' but does not muddy its conjugal thrust. These are love poems to every body, generously sifted through vectors of grace, exploded."

--Lee Ann Brown