Kirjahaku

Kaddy Benyon’s second collection, The Tidal Wife, is concerned with islands: both as physical landforms and as emotional states; the need to retreat and be cut off as much as the need to reconnect and come to trust the pulse of one’s internal tide. The poems address the day-to-day realities of being wife, mother, daughter, poet while drawing on nature’s rage and beauty to describe the shifting states of ‘I’.

Written during a residency with The Polar Museum in Cambridge, Robbergirls reimagines The Snow Queen as a Sapphic rite of passage. Offered in seven sections that echo the fairy tale’s form, these hot, tender and generous poems search for a lost other who is by turns friend, brother, son, lover, but ultimately an aspect of a fragmented self. In her formally playful and linguistically rich third collection, Benyon suggests that the ache for contact can be tempered by nature, even with disordered seasons. In striking poems that refuse to deny environmental breakdown, the poet holds space for the indigenous people of the Arctic as she considers the devastating impacts of climate change on their landscapes and lives.

Milk Fever is a prize-winning first collection from a new voice in contemporary British poetry. The poet’s former career as a television scriptwriter for young adults is evident in the fresh, unguarded and intimate address that moves seamlessly between tenderness and brutality in poems largely concerning experiences of motherhood: the joy, the passion and the delight of this unique mother-child dyad paired with shadowy twins – terror, despair and rage. The poems are urgent and sensual, even when mothers are not human beings: an eagle, a copper mine and a windmill are all given a maternal voice in a collection which searches the world for reunion with a lost other; a lost mother perhaps, or as in the Persephone and Demeter myth, a lost daughter. The poems travel through Chile, Italy, Russia, ancient Greece, Argentina and France in an attempt to explore the timeless and universal relationship, or variants of it, we all have with our mothers, the relationship that is the blueprint for all our future relationships. This is a collection for, against and about mother, for all that she is and everything we try to pretend she isn’t.