Never mind movements, schools and styles: fundamentally, there are two types of poet – those who see spirits, and those who just drink them. As Sean O'Brien noted when reviewing her Faber New Poets pamphlet in these pages in 2009, Fiona Benson is a sober, contemplative sort. But as her first full collection Bright Travellers reveals, she is as much drawn to the metaphysical as to the mystical, treating the poem as a kind of secular prayer.
One stylistic habit is her musing on a pivotal subject – a pine cone, say, or a "feral" rose – in the hope that, like a horse's skull placed in the corner of a room by guitarists, it might offer wider resonance through the poem's music. That rose, for instance, becomes no less than "its own lantern / hung above the garden", "ventricles and channels / charged with light, // its scarlet bell streaming, / as if it were Christ's sacred heart / radiating flames". As a concentrated, image-driven expression, this feels Romantic in origin, but in both theme and style it more clearly recalls Sylvia Plath, who emerges as a guiding hand in the dark. Comparisons between Plath and modern-day female poets are frequently dubious, of course – the work of lazy critics – but where Benson is concerned, the affinity is plain to see. Her obsession with animals, the wild and corporeal, with ghosts and with history's chasms; the handling of painful human emotion through naturalistic conceit; the searing imagery and singularly heightened register: all bear the hallmark of that most nihilistic and paradoxically tender of poets. When she muses on the vulnerability of a pine cone's needles, blown on the wind, it is hard to hear anyone else in the lines "one day / my daughter also / will travel far from here".
To dismiss Benson as a fine imitator and acolyte of Plath, however, would be to give her poetry short shrift. For one thing, there is a tranquil, Zen-like quality to some of her writing, measured lines and diction unspooling with an ease removed from the edgy, angular style employed elsewhere, acknowledging "our place // beneath this infinite sky / in a wind that knows we are mortal, porous, / a beautiful trick of the light".
"Love-Letter to Vincent", though, is the book's most sustained achievement. In these dramatic monologues Benson ventriloquises the prostitute-lover of the tortured Van Gogh, taking the titles of his canvases as a stepping-off point and framing device to paint portraits as intelligent and touching as they are visceral and grim. Though occasionally overblown – Benson has a tendency to reach for the intensifying adverb when a quieter, less cluttered phrasing would serve better – there is a good deal to admire: the smart riposte to masculine ignorance of female suffering that is "Still Life with Red Herrings"; the sun-lit sanctuary of "Yellow Room at Arles", where art becomes a means of preserving the past as a talisman against the future; love pitched against life's vicissitudes in "Self-portrait with a Bandaged Ear". "Here, whatever sorrow waits for us, is hope", ventures one poem, while another, written in the blaze of those famous sunflowers, declares: "Most of us are not this brave / our whole damn lives; / teach me to admit / a touch more light". Bright Travellers is a book of poems that balances its florid excesses with toughness, perspicacity and, above all, heart.
first published in The Guardian
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