Along with the new Alice Oswald, this is the stand-out Cape poetry book of 2019
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.
Vertigo & Ghost explodes into furious life with a series of
poems and fragments about the Greek god Zeus... jagged, staccato
poems that shoot down the pages like lightning bolts...
an addictive, thrilling, sickening experience. -- John Self
* 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. Mothers and
children, girls and women, their vulnerabilities and sorrows, fears
amidst grave danger, their beautiful animal selves. Against a
frightening darkness, these "sore jewels" radiate wild white-heat.
-- 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 *
An exceptional achievement. -- Paul Bailey * Literary Review
*
[A] tour-de-force... [Vertigo & Ghost] has
generated a lot of (justified) buzz... poems of lasting
power. * Telegraph *Poetry Book of the Month* *
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