Awards

• Joint winner for Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize 2015.
• Joint winner of Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize 2015
• Short-listed for Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize 2014 (UK)
• Short-listed for Forward Poetry Prize: Best First Collection 2014
• Short-listed for Forward Prizes for Poetry: Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection 2014 (UK)
• Short-listed for T S Eliot Prize 2015
• Shortlisted for Forward Poetry Prize: Best First Collection 2014.
• Shortlisted for T S Eliot Prize 2014.
• Shortlisted for T S Eliot Prize 2015.
• Winner of Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for Poetry 2015.

Overview

A collection of poetry from the Eric Gregory Award-winning Fiona Benson. 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 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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Reviews

Solemn scrutiny, intoxicating lyricism and a dark imagination. -- Ben Wilkinson * Guardian * Hugely impressive... [Benson] has the modest exactitude of a true poet. -- Kate Kellaway * Observer * Fiona Benson's debut collection may have been the most impressive published by a British poet last year. The 45 poems in Bright Travellers capture both her versatility...and her sense of balance. Themes of violence and loss, shown most vividly in her accounts of motherhood, are paired seamlessly with moments of great tenderness. * The Economist *

Solemn scrutiny, intoxicating lyricism and a dark imagination. -- Ben Wilkinson Guardian Hugely impressive... [Benson] has the modest exactitude of a true poet. -- Kate Kellaway Observer

Solemn scrutiny, intoxicating lyricism and a dark imagination. -- Ben Wilkinson Guardian

Solemn scrutiny, intoxicating lyricism and a dark imagination. -- Ben Wilkinson * Guardian * Hugely impressive... [Benson] has the modest exactitude of a true poet. -- Kate Kellaway * Observer * Fiona Benson's debut collection may have been the most impressive published by a British poet last year. The 45 poems in Bright Travellers capture both her versatility...and her sense of balance. Themes of violence and loss, shown most vividly in her accounts of motherhood, are paired seamlessly with moments of great tenderness. * The Economist *

Solemn scrutiny, intoxicating lyricism and a dark imagination. -- Ben Wilkinson Guardian Hugely impressive... [Benson] has the modest exactitude of a true poet. -- Kate Kellaway Observer Fiona Benson's debut collection may have been the most impressive published by a British poet last year. The 45 poems in Bright Travellers capture both her versatility...and her sense of balance. Themes of violence and loss, shown most vividly in her accounts of motherhood, are paired seamlessly with moments of great tenderness. The Economist

Author Information

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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