Kate Kellaway Reviews Vertigo & Ghost

At The Guardian, Kate Kellaway takes a close look at Fiona Benson's new poetry collection, Vertigo & Ghost. It's "one of the darkest, bravest and most unsettling collections I have read in a while," Kellaway writes. "Its first half turns to Greek mythology to explore violent crimes against women and casts Zeus as he-man, ace swimmer and serial rapist. Yet the opening poem, on the dawning of female sexuality, gives no clue of what is to follow." From there: 

It describes girls gathering on a tennis court:

and sex wasn’t here yet, but it was coming,
and we were running towards it,
its gorgeous euphoric mist;

From ordinary virginal appetite, there is a fall, as through a trap door, into a poem resembling a crime scene: “bullet-proof glass/and a speaker-phone between us/and still I wasn’t safe”. Zeus, however divine, seems dim but is no less frightening for that. He communicates in bullying capital letters and gets his kicks, with a horrible jauntiness, out of “the moment before death”. Whenever he waxes lyrical, he becomes frightening in a new way (we do not want this barbarian to sound like a poet):

ITS VIOLET GRAINS
DIMINISHING TO NOTHING
LITTLE BIRD CUPPED
IN THE HOLLOW OF MY PALM
ITS TINY QUENCH –
PHUT!
UNDER THE HOOD.

The form itself seems breathlessly predatory – there is no time to stop-and-search. This is universal drama and Benson does not neglect the bitter truth.

Read on at The Guardian.