Fiona Benson

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2018 FORWARD PRIZE* Violence hangs over this book like an electric storm. Beginning with a poem about the teenage dawning of sexuality, Vertigo & Ghost pitches quickly into a long sequence of graphic, stunning pieces about Zeus as a serial rapist, for whom woman are prey and sex is weaponised. These are frank, brilliant, devastating poems of vulnerability and rage, and as Zeus is confronted with aggressions both personal and historical, his house comes crumbling down. A disturbing contemporary world is exposed, in which violent acts against women continue to be perpetrated on a daily - hourly - basis. The book shifts, in its second half, to an intimate and lyrical document of depression and family life. It sounds out the complex and ambivalent terrain of early motherhood - its anxieties and claustrophobias as well as its gifts of tenderness and love - reclaiming the sanctuary of domestic private life, and the right to raise children in peace and safety. Vertigo & Ghost is an important, necessary book, hugely impressive in its range and risk, and dramatic in its currency: a collection that speaks out with clarity, grace and bravery against the abuse of power.

Vertigo and Ghost

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2021 FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST SINGLE POEM* The poems in Ephemeron deal with the short-lived and transitory - whether it's the brief, urgent lives of the first section, 'Insect Love Songs', the abrupt, anguished, physical and emotional changes during secondary school, as remembered in 'Boarding-School Tales', or parenting's day-by-day shifts through love and fear, hurt and healing, in 'Daughter Mother'. The long central section, 'Translations from the Pasiphaë', gathers these themes together in a blistering, unforgettable re-telling of the Greek myth of the Minotaur, as seen from the point of view of the bull-child's mother - the betrayed and violated Pasiphaë. The familiar legend of the dashing male hero slaying the monster in the labyrinth is transformed here into a story of ordinary people caught up in an extraordinary cycle of violence, power and the abuse of power. At the centre lies Pasiphaë calling for her son: 'They took him away from me/and they killed him in the dark, for years.' Telling uncomfortable truths, going deep into male and female drives and desires, our most tender and vulnerable places, and speaking of them in frank, unshrinking ways - these poems are afraid, certainly, but also beautiful, resolute and brave.

Ephemeron

Explores the shared human continuum of bodily longing - from the Prehistoric maker of a wooden fertility fetish, to a modern-day couple wading through summer pollen - and the timeless cycles of conception, birth and child-rearing.

Bright Travellers

Winner of the 2015 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize Winner of the 2015 Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection Shortlisted for the 2015 T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlisted for the 2014 Forward Prize for Best First Collection In this remarkable, intensely moving, first collection, Fiona Benson shows her fascination with human experience. The poems move on archaeological fast-forward from submerged Devonian forests and a Paleolithic cave-bear skull to the site of decommissioned submarines at HMNB Devonport, where the sea is ‘still a torpedo-path, / an Armageddon road’. She explores the shared human continuum of bodily longing – from the Prehistoric maker of a wooden fertility fetish, to a modern-day couple wading through summer pollen – and the timeless cycles of conception, birth and child-rearing. A central sequence of dramatic monologues addressed to Van Gogh allows for a focussed exploration of depression, violence, passion and creativity. In these poems, as in all the poems in this impressive debut, we feel keenly the sense of life lived at the edge of threat – catastrophe, even – but also on the cusp of beauty and happiness. Other poems about the bewildering loss of miscarriage are hard to read and impossible to forget, moving with grace and authority through great grief to arrive at a hard-won destination of selfless, unqualified love. ‘I remember again / the corridor / of the labour ward // and that woman / sitting weeping / with her man // having given birth / to a death – / small grey face, // no breath, / something you cannot help / but love – // habibi, akushla, /I go home alone / but carry you, // courie you, / little slipped thing, / to the ends of the earth.’

Funded by Arts Council England, the FABER NEW POETS programme is an exciting new venture whose aim is to create a culture of support for select new poets at pre-first collection stage. By offering a tri-partite package of financial assistance, mentorship and pamphlet publication by Faber, the scheme intends to provide care and direction to four talented new stars in 2009, with four similar awards to be made in 2010.In 2009, the awarded poets are Fiona Benson, Heather Phillipson Toby Martinez de las Rivas and Jack Underwood.

Alan Warner

Sophy Dale

'Addicted to Brightness' is an anthology of newly commissioned poems.

Addicted to Brightness

This pamphlet, Ariadne, is the culmination of The Michael Marks International Greek Bicentennial Poetry Prize. It contains the winning sequence of poems, Ariadne, by Fiona Benson, and a separate portfolio of illustrations, by Judith Eyal.

Fiona Benson

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