Bright Travellers

Fiona Benson

$29.99

Paperback

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English

Jonathan Cape Ltd
15 May 2014

Poetry; Poetry by individual poets

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.'

By: Fiona Benson
Imprint: Jonathan Cape Ltd
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 198mm, Width: 134mm, Spine: 6mm
Weight: 85g
ISBN: 9780224099493
ISBN 10: 0224099493
Pages: 80
Publication Date: 15 May 2014
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Fiona Benson won an Eric Gregory Award in 2006 and a Faber New Poets Award in 2009. She lives near Exeter with her partner and their daughter.

Reviews for Bright Travellers

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 *

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.

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Bright Travellers

Fiona Benson

$29.99

Paperback

Reviews for Bright Travellers

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