The thrilling story of the healers, artists and prodigies once persecuted as witches – from the three-time T.S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted poet

POETRY BOOK SOCIETY CHOICE

In her thrilling fourth collection, Midden Witch, Fiona Benson enters the world of familiars, fables and hedge-magic and focuses on the persistent superstition – the fear and false knowledge – that was witchcraft.

Telling tales of imagined transformations and spell-casting, these poems present a litany of artists, dreamers and outcasts and a study of their ostracisation. The poet looks at how gifted, sometimes troubled, individuals – generally healers, artists, prodigies and almost always women – became scapegoats, victims of societal paranoia and persecution, and were hounded for centuries, often to a gratuitously violent public execution.

In Midden Witch, these women speak back to us with dark humour, insight and real herbal knowledge. Reckoning with middle age, marginalisation, perimenopause and a steady, unstoppable vanishing, this troubled codex of remedies, spells and stories speaks to human fear in the face of the unknown, and a drive to protect our loved ones that transcends all rational thought. At play in the language of archival accounts of witchcraft, this is a dark, eclectic spell-book that witnesses the end-days of magic.

‘Benson is one of the finest English poets writing today’ Blake Morrison

‘No one writes the way Fiona Benson does. No one is as raging, as fearless’ Daisy Johnson

A new collection of Benson’s wise and vivid work is a real occasion… exciting…fully inhabited and multi-faceted’ Guardian

Praise

These are poems cast as beautiful, intricate spells, reminding us there is more to life than we can hope to explain
Guardian