Ephemeron

Fiona Benson

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Tr. Paperback

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The third collection from one of Britain's most exciting and celebrated contemporary poets

*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.

Published: 17 May 2022
ISBN: 9781787333710
Imprint: Jonathan Cape
Format: Trade Paperback
Pages: 112
RRP: $37.00

Categories:

Poetry

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About the author

Fiona Benson

Fiona Benson lives in Devon with her husband and their two daughters. She has published two previous collections which were both shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize: Bright Travellers, which won the 2015 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry's Prize for First Full Collection, and Vertigo & Ghost, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Rathbones Folio Prize and won both the Roehampton Poetry Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Collection.

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Praise for Ephemeron

A new collection of Benson's wise and vivid work is a real occasion... exciting...fully inhabited and multi-faceted.
Fiona Sampson, Guardian

There have been a number of impressive reshapings of classical tales in recent years, and it is a bold poet who would risk comparison with Alice Oswald and Anne Carson, but Benson's 'Translations from the Pasiphaë' earns its place alongside their works.
William Wootten, Literary Review

There is a gorgeous, sunbleached quality to much of this writing, which stuns and scorches. It will be a pleasure to see which cycles of myth Benson takes on next.
Stephanie Sy-Quia, Times Literary Supplement

Vertigo & Ghost explodes into furious life ... poems that shoot down the pages like lightning bolts...
Guardian

Vertigo & Ghost knocked the breath from me. Such furious, fierce, ecstatic poems, at once brutal and heartachingly tender; I lay awake at night unable to stop thinking about them.
Liz Berry

This extraordinarily moving collection is a bold confrontation of violence against women. Vertigo & Ghost is one of the darkest, bravest and most unsettling collections I have read in a while.
Kate Kellaway, Observer