Ruins
by Fiona Benson
Here’s my body
in the bath, all the skin’s
inflamed trenches
and lost dominions,
my belly’s fallen keystone
its slackened tilt –
for all the Aztec gold
I’d not give up
this room where you slept,
your spine to my right,
your head
stoppered in my pelvis
like a good amen –
amen I say
to my own damn bulk,
my milk-stretched breasts –
amen I say to all of this
if I have you –
your screw-ball smile
at every dawn,
your half-pitched, milk-wild smile
at every waking call,
my loved-beyond-all-reason
darling, dark-eyed girl.
From Vertigo & Ghost. Reproduced with kind permission from Wild Court.
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best Single Poem 2018
Vertigo & Ghost
Fiona Benson
About Fiona Benson
Fiona Benson (b. 1978, Wroughton) won the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2019 with Vertigo & Ghost, a collection whose central sequence was an astonishingly vivid reworking of Greek myth. Her forthcoming collection from Cape, Ephemeron, also features a long mythic sequence, from which her shortlisted poem ‘Androgeous’ is drawn. ‘It is a retelling of the minotaur myth, which tries to reinstate Pasiphaë, the minotaur’s mother, at the center of the story’, writes Benson. ‘Androgeus is her firstborn son, who is killed by a bull in mainland Greece.’
‘Androgeous’, and the sequence to which it belongs, were written during the first lockdown in 2020. ‘I thought at the time that I was indulging in a great act of escapism, travelling in my imagination to sundrenched Greece. But looking back at them they are all about being trapped.’
Forward Prizes History:
- 2021 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, shortlisted for ‘Androgeus’ (Times Literary Supplement)
- 2020 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, shortlisted for ‘Mama Cockroach, I Love You’ (Poetry London)
- 2019 Forward Prize for Best Collection, Winner for Vertigo & Ghost (Cape)
- 2018 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, shortlisted for ‘Ruins’ (Wild Court)
- 2014 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection, shortlisted for Bright Travellers (Cape)
