Roy Bentley
Ohio University alum Roy Bentley ’79, ’81M.A. was named a finalist for the 2018 Miller Williams Poetry Prize for his collection Walking with Eve in the Loved City, reports the University of Arkansas.
Bentley earned a bachelor’s degree from University College and an M.A. from the College of Arts & Sciences.
The winner and finalists were selected by former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins. The prize was won by Travis Mossotti, and the other finalist was P. Scott Cunningham. The University of Arkansas Press will publish all three books.
The prize and series are named in honor of Miller Williams, an acclaimed poet, founding director of The University of Arkansas Press and a long-time professor in the University creative writing department. In 1988 the press published Billy Collins’s debut collection, The Apple that Astonished Paris….
Roy Bentley is the author of four previous books, Boy in a Boat, Any One Man, The Trouble with a Short Horse in Montana, and Starlight Taxi, which won the 2012 Blue Lynx Poetry Prize. He is the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the NEA, six Ohio Arts Council fellowships, and a Florida Division of Cultural Affairs fellowship. His poems have appeared in the Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Blackbird, RATTLE, and elsewhere. Bentley calls his new collection “a funny, pissed-off book. It’s an America of hopeless folks putting a shoulder to the stone and starting to roll it up the nearest hill for something to do.” This, Collins said, “is a lively, collection that instructs, delights, and uplifts.”
About Walking with Eve in the Loved City
“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,” says the Amazon description.
“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.”
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