Skip to main content

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.


 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

February update!

  Hello! Please see above for a screenshot (not sure who the photo is by) from the lovely Fragmented Voices website which has my poem, Escaping Pheasants, as their featured poem today. This poem is inspired by the pheasants which are brought in to our local country house for people who are that way inclined to shoot. Sometimes I see them flapping down from the estate wall and on to the busy road, making a break for it toward the moors. Good luck pheasants. Escaping Pheasants also features in my book, Little Gods, published by the marvellous Roswell Publishing and available from booksellers and Amazon, or get in touch to get a signed copy from me. Other recent successes include two poems in Obsessed with Pipework #105, a Haiku in Coin Operated Press ' Haiku Zine, The Libraries  came out in Culture Matters' Bread & Roses Anthology, and, as I mentioned last time, When you slow a bit you can see the way , another poem from Little Gods, came out in Butcher's Dog #19. I have ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Happy New Year!

I can still wish you happy new year before January's out, right? Having spending a while doing research and convincing myself I can't write, I'm back in the room in 2019, sending my little baby poems out into the world. I have broken up the chapbook I was trying to get published, I've rewritten lots of stuff, and I'm happily sending them out to places where I hope they might find a happy home, while supporting some of the fantastic poetry magazines out there. One of those fantastic poetry magazines - Picaroon Poetry  - run by the marvellous Kate Garrett - has already accepted one of my babies. It was one of the ones that I'd started to feel bored by, so I tore it to bits, rewrote it, and sent it off to Kate, who will be sending it out into the world in Picaroon Poetry #16 in May (which is terribly organised if you ask me, I don't even know what I'm doing tomorrow!). Thanks Kate!  Hopefully I'll be letting you all know about more successes soo...
2 comments
Read more

Coffee: a poetry post

Hello! The prompt over at Mum Turned Mom is History , which immediately makes me think of Herstory, and how History is written by the victors, and there are many stories to explain the same event, and even one person's story changes over time, and memory is malleable and all that stuff. I wasn't going to do it, because I didn't want it to be too big and too heavy, and I've had so much fun working on a short story I'm submitting to a competition, which is weird because I usually hate writing short stories, but this was perfect, so I celebrated that story with a cup of coffee, in a cup my sister gave me which she didn't realise would match my new wallpaper/curtains - I can't remember, I was pretty sure it was wallpaper, but have no memory of wallpapering, although I am still pretty sure there was wallpaper, particularly on the wall with cupboards and a fireplace, because that was a total pain to do. There must have been wallpaper, but there were ...
Post a Comment
Read more