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.'
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