Reviews
"'We Lost The Birds' is a collection full of sad, strange and darkly funny: poems that look at the place and impact of humans on the planet and wider panoramas of existence."
Colin Bancroft, Nine Pens
"'Eel' was the kind of poem I could read a hundred times and find something new in it with each successive reading....It is a difficult poem to paraphrase - to appreciate it, you really do just have to read it. Ideally at least ten times...I don't want to spoil the ending for you, but there's a delightful shock, a sense that resurrection is also terrifying."
Helen Mort
"A poet in love with language."
Liz Berry
"In Ben Verinder’s brief and beautiful elegy for a recently dead father, ‘Signs of Life’, the word ‘audacity’ lands in the final line of the poem with the full force of loss…How dare these ordinary things exist when my loved one has gone; a sentiment many of us will have experienced in bereavement, compressed into eight letters which, for this reader, transforms the whole poem."
Esther Morgan
“This poem [Acrylic Eyes Yellowing Under Strip Lights in Acton]…has something very important and universal to say. The shelving-away of statesmen and superstars, the abandonment of great figures of politics and pop culture, remind us powerfully – terrifyingly – that all things must pass; all flesh is grass. That placement of Gorbachev at the very centre of the poem, just at this moment, is an astonishingly apt touch. The poem is linguistically inventive without ever showing off or going too far. The verbs are wonderfully muscular. The final phrase, with its risky pun, seems to sum up the poem perfectly; simultaneously funny, heart-breaking and wise.”
Anthony Dunn and Tom Masters
"My favourite juxtaposition...[of Rialto 98] is where Ben Verinder’s six liner ‘Signs of Life’ faces Mark Russell’s ten line ‘Scent’, both poems use a minimum of words, though very different in their subject matter, to maximum effect (note to those who thought poets had given it up – check out Ben’s use of rhyme)."
Michael Mackmin, The Rialto Newsletter