Review: Vertigo and Ghost by Fiona Benson

I am hardly new to the party in reviewing Fiona Benson's astonishing second collection, Vertigo and Ghost. It came out from Cape Poetry in January 2019, and has already been talked about a lot. Here's a good review from The Guardian back in January. - (they were selling it at a discounted price then - worth checking). You don't need me to tell you it is an excellent poetry book.  Fiona has already won the Forward Prize for best poetry collection, giving her £10,000, and the book is also shortlisted for the 2019 TS Eliot prize.

I only just got round to reading it as I have a bit of a book backlog - it's a hazard of working in a library! I got it on inter-library loan (thanks Newcastle libraries) because like most libraries at the moment, my local library has had funding cuts and now can't get much poetry at all, so it takes a little longer, but if more of us get poetry out of libraries, it becomes more cost effective to buy the books. Have at it!

Anyway, Vertigo and Ghost is a book of two parts. The first focuses on Zeus, as the embodiment of pussy grabbing toxic masculinity. This is really important, it seems to me, because being in this moment of history while it's happening can feel like an onslaught of inescapable awfulness, but this device of this hideously awful god forces us to step back from our current political shit shows and see them in their proper patriarchal context. To take a little bit from [Zeus: Danaë]:

SUCH CHUTZPAH
I SHOULD SMITE HIM
BUT IT'S FUN
TO WATCH HIS WIFE
HER SMILE FADING
AS HE LOOKS AWAY

The second half of the book fits beautifully with the first, focusing in on a woman's experience of motherhood, home, and the fear inherent in this, especially in the context of Zeus as god, of patriarchal dominance and war. We have become used to the dreadful, powerful male, so it is these poems, on the truths of motherhood, a subject matter which has been woefully neglected in published poetry, which really moved me: the exhausting, hopeful, scary work of looking after a second child while painfully aware of how little your first now has of you expressed powerfully in In the Milk Days of Your Sister, the loss of self fascinatingly explored in Cells, the global maternal feeling and fear every time we remember how fragile a child's life is in Hide and Seek (see quote in image), and so much more than this. We need poetry like this. We need more of it.