Ephemeron

by Fiona Benson

The poems in Ephemeron deal with the short-lived and transitory - whether it's the brief, urgent lives of the first section, 'Insect Love Songs', the abrupt, anguished, physical and emotional changes during secondary school, as remembered in 'Boarding-School Tales', or parenting's day-by-day shifts through love and fear, hurt and healing, in 'Daughter Mother'.

The long central section, 'Translations from the Pasiphaë', gathers these themes together in a blistering, unforgettable re-telling of the Greek myth of the Minotaur, as seen from the point of view of the bull-child's mother - the betrayed and violated Pasiphaë. The familiar legend of the dashing male hero slaying the monster in the labyrinth is transformed here into a story of ordinary people caught up in an extraordinary cycle of violence, power and the abuse of power. At the centre lies Pasiphaë calling for her son: 'They took him away from me/and they killed him in the dark, for years.'

Telling uncomfortable truths, going deep into male and female drives and desires, our most tender and vulnerable places, and speaking of them in frank, unshrinking ways - these poems are afraid, certainly, but also beautiful, resolute and brave.

Genres: Poetry, Disability

128 pages, Paperback

Published February 10, 2022

Reviews

[Rosamund Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Divided into four sections, Ephemeron expands and deepens themes Benson drew on in Vertigo and Ghost, including the relationship of gods and men, motherhood, and trauma. The first section, Insect Love Songs, draws on her recent chapbook Bioluminescent Baby in which she gives a careful, in-depth study to a series of different insects, including cockroaches and mosquitoes. These poems have been recorded for radio and published widely: they are imaginative and considered studies, which highlight the importance of insects in our world, and the ways that even the most reviled insect can be vital. Some of these are moving -- Mama Cockroach is really surprising in its tenderness, and Synchronous Fireflies is haunting -- but overall I found this to be one of the weaker sections: too many of the poems overlapped in ideas or images, and some parts are overblown.

The second section, Boarding School Tales, is a series of stories set in a boarding school, exploring youth, fear, desire and growing up, as well as capturing the specific flavour of being away from one's parents at a young age. Some of these are very imaginative, or very sad, but overall this is the weakest section: each poem seems to follow the same formula, beginning with a scene-setting in the boarding school, and ending with a specific lesson or moment of clarity. These poems don't have the same depth as much of Benson's work -- they're not bad poems, but she's such a good poet that the weaknesses stand out.

The third sections, Translations from the Pasiphae, is without a doubt the strongest in the book, and I found it completely captivating. It is a study of Pasiphae of Greek mythology: she is a sister to Circe, and wife to Minos, and, most famously, the mother of the Minotaur. The poems follow Pasiphae's life, including her birth, the influence of bulls within her story, her marriage to Minos, and the birth of her many children, including Asterios, the Minotaur. In Benson's version, the Minotaur is not a boy with a bull's head, but a child born disabled, who suffers from epilepsy, and is reviled by those who do not understand him. Rumours spread about Pasiphae's dalliance with a bull because she gave birth to a child considered imperfect. This is by far the longest section in the book, and I think Benson should have published this section as a book on its own, because it is so complete, so moving, and so utterly unlike the rest of her collection. Her exquisite writing, characterisation, and exploration into myth, deserves the highest praise. I'm always concerned about how writers will handle the theme of disability, and I was deeply moved by Benson's tenderness and compassion in her depiction of Asterios and his mother's relationship with him. If anything, this section could be longer, because Benson deals with so many themes and characters, though she captures all of them well. This section is breathtaking.

The final section, Daughter Mother, is also beautiful: in Vertigo and Ghost, Benson wrote about her children with imagination and tenderness, and this is what she achieves here again: she writes about her daughters as individuals, and about what it means to be a mother, in a way that surprises me with its care and beauty. These poems compliment the Pasiphae section as they are also ways of looking at what it means to be a mother and to be a child. Very successful.

Benson is an immensely skilled poet, and this collection cements how excited I am by her work.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is Benson’s third collection but my first time reading her. I was fully engaged with her exquisite poems about the ephemeral, whether that be insect lives, boarding school days, primal emotions or moments from her children’s early years. The book is in four discrete corresponding sections (“Insect Love Songs,” “Boarding-School Tales,” “Translations from the Pasiphaë” and “Daughter Mother”) but the themes and language bleed from one into another and the whole is shot through with astonishing corporeality and eroticism.

The form varies quite a lot – bitty lines, stanzas, blocky paragraph-like stories – and alliteration, slant rhymes and unexpected metaphors (a wasp’s nest as “a piñata of stings,” “this avant-garde chandelier” and an “electric hotel / of spit-balled papier mâché”) make each poem glisten. I’ll even let her off for the long section inspired by my pet hate, Greek mythology (so gruesome, so convoluted), because of how she uses these melodramatic situations to explore universal emotions. She does something interesting with the story of the Minotaur (Asterios), suggesting that instead of being born a literal bull he was born deformed or disabled and no one knew what to make of him, but even so he had a mother’s love.

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[Keira · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unsurprisingly I adored this book. Benson is a fantastic poet and I adore her work, my favourite is always the Greek Mythology section, but I like that she included other parts, it’s shows how well rounded she is in her craft. This collection really made me feel for Asterios, showing that he was not simply the blood thirsty Minotaur that he is portrayed as in almost all other works, he is a lost child who was treated cruelly by almost all those who interacted with him and then cast out by his father, who is ultimately the reason why Asterios remains labelled as the monster he is today.
The written expression is perfect and the structure is stunning.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

Fiona Benson is one of the best in the business and I loved Ephemeron !! Will be reading Vertigo & Ghost soon hopefully as well. My favourite section was Insect Love Songs which I really think is one of the best studies of the past few years in intricacy, filth and delicacy in the poetic line. There's a beautiful exploration of tension in the wing-sheen and the sexed urge.

Largest section here is a form of the Pasiphaë which shifted away from this intricacy (perhaps by aesthetic necessity) to a narrative focus. It's a very impressive series, collection-sized on its own. It's something I'm sure I'll be returning to as it seems a bit of an education in writing a paced poetic narrative.

more more more more thank you FB

[Julie Gardner · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has confirmed my view that Fiona Benson is one of my favourite poets. I loved the whole collection but particularly enjoyed 'Translations from the Pasiphaë', a long sequence of poems which offers an alternative reading of some of the Greek myths while at the same time confronting some very contemporary issues. It's not an easy read and I found the notes at the back were very helpful.

[S P · Rating 5 out of 5]

'I died in Athens, thinking of my mother.
Or was I on my way to Thebes?
Difficult to say, this is a slow, forgetting place.
There was a competition, I had won —
something — a crown, a coin, a paper wreath?
Then stabbing pain — a bull’s two horns,
or a bar-tab brawl, or an Athenian lover
I hadn’t treated well — daggering my lower abdomen.
Can it have been my father’s white bull?
The one he bathed and preened? It doesn’t matter now.
After the wound, came dying: fast then slow, slow, slow.
I had doctors and staunchings and stitches and fevers,
time to dream about the sun-scorched cliffs of Crete,
the sweetness of the singing crickets,
the way the thyme would twist and bake,
how my lover’s skin smelt of it, how
when I took him in my mouth he’d grip my hair
and groan and move me to his pleasure
and forget I was the prince. Afterwards
I’d lie with my cheek on his warm chest
and watch the fish shoal in the water far below,
every stone and crab’s claw, every sea urchin’s thorn
delineated … There came a peace like that, at last,
when everything seemed clear and calm and bright,
and I was sitting on the warm stone step
with my mother, eating a dish of cold yoghurt
laced with honey, and she was singing
a soft and faraway song in her other tongue;
she laughed and mussed my hair
and blew on my nape to cool my neck.
And then I died.'

('Androgeus', p72)

[Jem Tezz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Fiona Benson. The 'insect love songs' were perfect for my word cravings post-Vertigo & Ghost. I admire how much and how earnestly they had been researched-Benson shadowed biologists, conservationists, physicists in insect labs-and you really sense her obsessiveness which is addictive. She writes forensically about insect life: their strange choreographies, slime and stickiness, metamorphoses, their deep underground chambers. She describes them with curious maternal sympathy, but also a raging horniness-she takes so much pleasure in this new insectile language and taxonomy. Larvae wriggle and swell and emerge from hard skins with soft wet heads... There is hatching, itching, pupating, crawling, feeding, flying. Insects want to breed, reproduce, drop 'rushed deposits' of eggs into warm waters. They break free from the old shells of their bodies ('crisp' skin with 'shellacked seams') 'breaking all the knots, untangling', they 'shed instar after instar - tomorrow she will come to the luminous core'. This shedding is a spectacle, performed by a mayfly dancer on the water's sticky lip, a sort of desperate stripping: 'if I spin for you will you come?'

Firefly Suite - 'Big Dipper Fireflies' was my classic weep poem: 'how we peer into the improvised chambers we make with our fingers', 'the soft green flush in the lamp we make with our hands'. Up close, a blue ghost firefly has a transparent, 'reticulated' back (best word ever), with 'epaulettes' of light: 'it's the rest of your life's work to make yourself a lid'. Cicada wings are 'mullioned'. Crickets have 'prehensile' (second best word) antennae which test and probe the air, twirling like ribbons, ready to taste and latch.

Other good insect words: exuvia. ovipositor. imago and subimago. pinions.

Translations from the Pasiphae was also so vivid. I found her interpretation of baby Asterios (the ostracised minotaur) so tender and raw. Considering the little cub born in light of ancient greek attitudes towards disability and deformity in children, as in relation to the monstrous or divine.

[Chris S · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worth it just for 'Dispatches'. Great collection.

[Steven Edmondson]

As big of an idiot as this’ll make me sound, I like that Benson’s poems really do not make you work that hard
to grasp what they’re about, at least on a surface level.

I think the flipside to being so *legible*, the way Benson’s poems are, is that then the content of the poems, presented with so little obfuscation (which, as frustrating as poems can be when they ask much of you but turn out to yield so little, I think sometimes it’s the game of decoding that generates the interest or that really amounts to the operation of the poem, the data generated by the conjunction of very strictly limited information amounting to a sense of something far greater than the detail presented in part), actually has to be interesting, to earn the immediacy - which is a hurdle Benson clears.

I think the ask these poems make of you isn’t an exercise of patience, but, like, emotional capacity. They ask to take you to difficult, sore places, identifying sites of repression, then probing.

I think these poems are very English, and the English upper middle class more specifically, in their focus. I think they apply a very culturally specific lens across, on the surface of it, very different subject matters - to take the suites here on boarding schools and the Pasiphae canon respectively. I think, as a collection, Ephemeron alights upon and exposes ways we’ve been culturally trained to overlook the friction we *know* is there across all these things.

Boarding schools are basically a by-word for repression - and that being known, we don’t tend as a culture to want to probe the specific experiences. And likewise in the encounter this presents with the Greek canon - it exposes as shifting, unsettled - weeping and raw - a set of stories that largely became fixed, ossified in our collective imagination, hundreds of years ago.

Benson’s reframing of Ovidian narratives reaches genuine brilliance - taking some of the oldest myths we have and interrogating the source of their metaphoric or emotional power - Scylla’s transformation into a bird, as per Ovid, becomes a metamorphosis that is less literal but more immediate - she became a bird in the sense that the birds, their calls recalling her screams, became a trigger for guilt or even a kind of post-traumatic response for those that witnessed or were party to what happened - it feels entirely true to the narrative while putting dead centre an emotional charge that, when just sitting and reading classics, can feel elusive - still present but a bit buried.

It’s a book that works to excavate those possibilities from source texts we know but aren’t trained to look at so *laterally* - the way these stories represent a long-dead culture grappling with the same basic brains and biology, desires and fears, we have now. I think the sections on motherhood here operate along similar lines - that as a culture we overlook all these parts that hurt.

Its Englishness is key to the book’s focus, but probably also its few missteps or blindspots - at (a very few)points it feels slightly that the book’s not fully aware of the charge of some of its choices, or of the way these areas of discourse have become more complex (eg, the malaria poem, and i felt the mention of a cockroach being ‘cosy with the aunties in reeking slums’ was surely not intended to feel as loaded as it reads to me - in an otherwise fantastic poem).

There’s a poem in the boarding school section where Benson dissects in parentheses ways in which her perspective in childhood was ‘stupid, racist’ - I think this was a mistake - as it draws attention to, or makes feel imbalanced, the other (few) sections where the poems perhaps broach something difficult but don’t interrogate themselves in the same way. It’s the only thing that makes me hold back from just giving this a five - it’s one of the strongest and most emotionally charged sets of poems I’ve read in years.

[Dominic H · Rating 3 out of 5]

For me marginally less successful than 'Vertigo and Ghost'. The same problems with structure and at times incongruity, except at a relatively facile level, between the sections. Again I felt the most interesting part of the book was the reimagining of greek myth, centred this time around Pasiphaë. But even here the verse form is generally less convincing and at times lacks facility and fluency. So a slight disappointment. Nevertheless always interesting.

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I feel like a doll / strangely played in a script whose plot I do not understand.” Ephemeron, the latest poetry collection by Fiona Benson, is such a worthy successor to Vertigo & Ghost, one of my all-time favourites. The poems here are tender and dark and devastating, treading that strange thin line between brutality and delicacy. The collection is made up of four sequences: Insect Love Songs, Boarding-School Tales, Translations from The Pasiphaë, Daughter Mother. Insect Love Songs is full of gorgeous moments, many of them fraught: ‘Mosquitoes, Mozambique’, “swimming in the vast margins / of his terror”; ‘Blue Morpho, Crypsis’, “It closes its door, it closes it closes it closes its door. / And there’s no way back to innocence from here.” Love and light are present but in danger: “the dark is drowned, but some things / you can only find beyond the light”, the opening poem declares; later, “though I wanted you / for your beauty, it was for your gentleness I stayed.” My favourite part of the second section is in ‘Ink’, a nun shown “suffering like Sebastian”. The third part is the most striking, one of the most varied, evocative sequences of late, pure devastation in ‘Pasiphaë on Glaucos’, ‘Oarsman on the Drowning of Nisus’s Daughter Scylla’, ‘Pasiphaë Goes Home’, and the delicate, heartbreaking pair of ‘Queen’s Women: Daedalus and Icarus’ and ‘Pasiphaë on Asterios’s Death’, on parental grief: “They took him away from me / and they killed him in the dark, for years.” And I loved the painful final section, the unbearable love and tenderness of ‘Isla, Injury’, and the wish in the final poem “that I may keep her safe”.

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the second collection of Fiona Benson's poetry that I've read after Vertigo and Ghost. It's astonishingly good poetry. I binged it. It's beautiful, moving, hard, harsh and pretty damn good.

It's divided into four sections: Insect Love Songs, Boarding School Tales, Translations from the Pasiphaë, and Daughter Mother.

Insect Love Songs and Translations from the Pasiphaë were the two I found myself impressed with the most. I don't think any modern poet is as capable as stripping the classical civilisation off of Greek mythology and revealing its cruelty, pain, and darkness as Fiona Benson. And the way she has centred Pasiphaë in a series of stories about her children and grandchildren is excellent craft.

Insect Love Songs uses various different insects and their lives as love stories. I loved her description of a wasps nest from 'Wasp Theology':

It hangs like a birthday,
like a paper balloon
a piñata of stings

But it is full of phrases as glorious as that. I could have noted dozens of them down.

Boarding School Tales is what you'd expect from the title but there's a phrase that I think explains the worst part of boarding school life as I've perceived it from a poem called 'Junior Boarding House', which I will try to remember:

in loco parentis : signifying love
too far away to matter much.

Daughter Mother is about, well, the bringing up daughters and being a mother. Again it is full of great poetry and...look I'm going to stop raving about this now. It's brilliant. You should read it.

[Jim Puskas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fiona Benson packs an awful lot into such as slim volume. Although the four sections in this collection differ greatly in subject matter and setting, an intense mood of urgency prevails over all of them. And there’s an uncompromisingly feminine stance throughout.
In “Boarding House Tales”, seemingly unable to restrain herself, she spins though the abrupt social and biological changes that dominate early teen years.
In “Translations from the Pasiphaë” Benson turns the classic Greek tale of the Minotaur on its head, presenting it from the point of view of the beast’s abused and heartbroken mother; the passions are amped up and neither villains nor heroes nor victims remain clear-cut.
In the final section, “Mother Daughter”, in a sense the obverse of teenage angst, we’re plunged into the combined terror and exaltation of motherhood.
For me, however, it was the poems in the first section, “Insect Love Songs” with their unbridled lyricism that were the most delightful.
In “Mayfly”:
Tomorrow’s dancer / on the water’s / sticky lip
hurrying out / of her husk — / a lush fluttering
as she struggles / into late noon light, / breaking all the knots
untangling / from her own lost corpse, / its five-pointed shadow
escaping into air / taking refuge / in the willow.
Throughout the collection, Benson plays with time, speeding up and slowing down to match the mood and desires of the moment; a neat trick, subtly executed.
Beautiful, passionate work.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought Fiona’s book back when she was mentoring me. He writing is so beautifully dark and unafraid, and a lot of her work with the body and young sexuality inspires me a lot. I often re-read the section ‘Boarding School Tales’. Her handling of the taboo is exquisite; her work is so powerful and I think she one of the best poets writing today.

[Ariel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was worried I wouldn't enjoy this as much as her previous collections, but my fears were allayed from the first poem. It's so nice to have a contemporary lyric poet who isn't ashamed of being a lyric poet.

[Donna]

A new poet for me.
Outstanding collection of poetry.
Not all an easy read but though provoking and often challenging.

[Kristiana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal!

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first time I’ve been moved by poetry

[Charlotte Kelly · Rating 2 out of 5]

*1.5

[ManGar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting poetry themes that taught me a lot about insects, mythology, life.

[Luke Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A huge influence on my own work. Fiona Benson's poetry cuts deep to the soul. Refreshingly honest and achingly beautiful.

[Hannah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Enjoyed two collections out of the four

[Terence]

7 out of 10.

Especially good were the Pasiphae- and Minotaur-related poems. Recommended.