Ephemeron

(Paperback)

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The third collection from one of Britain's most exciting and celebrated contemporary poets **SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE** **SHORTLISTED FOR THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE** 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 Pasiphae', 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 Pasiphae. 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 Pasiphae 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.

Reviews

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 Pasipha' earns its place alongside their works ... In Ephemeron, Fiona Benson's capacity for capturing bodily sympathy in verse manifests as something like a superpower. -- 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 *
Benson retells the Greek myth... in a long-lined, novelistic sequence of rare psychological plausibility: yes, you think, yes, that's exactly how it happened. * Telegraph, 20 Best Poetry Books of 2022 *
Benson's third collection Ephemeron is split between nature, motherhood and Greek myth. But few poets write on these themes so brilliantly; Benson's urgent compassion makes us care. * Daily Telegraph *

Author Bio

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.