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By Aaron Lembo

Image: Gareth Franklin

Fiona Benson’s debut collection, Bright Travellers, is an extraordinary exploration of the natural landscape, the human condition and childbirth. The poems in this book showcase a poet fully in control of her material and who has the ability to craft highly visual and unforgettable works. A recurring theme of loss and hope underpins this essential collection.

Bright Travellers is littered with astoundingly lyrical nature poems; an example of this type of verse can be seen in ‘Clapper Bridge’. Benson creatively imbues the poem with precise language to describe the physical appearance of the bridge in its woodland setting. The first of five quatrains reads:

‘Clappers: quarried flats

laid like tableboards

over stacked supports,

colonised by lichens, moss.’

The poem evokes a strong sense of the pastoral and successfully utilises the technique of direct address to describe how someone would interact and cross such a bridge in the following stanzas.

A central sequence within the collection explores the troubled life of the painter Vincent van Gogh in a series of dramatic monologues that revel in the physical, the violent and the fractured state of existence. The sequence is titled ‘Love-Letter to Vincent’ and every poem is named after a painting Van Gogh actually painted. Here Benson masters the ekphrastic practice of synthesising visual art and poetry with great success. This sequence transcends merely re-imagining Van Gogh’s works as it harnesses erotic and tender diction to create unforgettable images and narratives.

‘Still Life with Red Herring’ is one of the strongest poems in the sequence because it boasts candid lines such as: ‘One day you wake – phlegm in your throat,/ the shakes – and paint these parched and stinking fish’. The speaker in this poem is a woman who scolds Van Gogh for his love of whores and drink. However, the speaker clearly has invested interest in the troubled artist, and by the poem’s end she erotically teases him: ‘besides, wouldn’t you rather be a woman/ raising herself to another woman’s lips/ like this, like this?’ The tone of the poem shifts from line to line while the consistent use of clear, concrete images enhances the seductive and disturbing nature of the poem and sequence as a whole.

Many of the poems in this sequence can be read as sonnets although they rarely adhere to many of the form’s conventions beyond being fourteen lines long. Rarely are they written to a set rhyme scheme, or predetermined metronome. The volta is often mercurial and unfixed.

‘Sheep’ is a breath-taking poem which viscerally brings together haunting images of a ewe surrounded by ‘her three dead lambs’ and the speaker’s ‘miscarried child/ guttering out/ soaking the mattress in blood.’ The speaker can’t help but watch the sheep’s brutal plight before reflecting on her own tragic experience with childbirth. The poem ends with the speaker gathering her soiled sheets, after coming to terms with the tragedy, and walking away in the face of adversity and darkness. There are many other poems similar to this one in Bright Travellers and they are all equally as affecting and moving.

A perfect, breath-taking debut collection.

Aaron Lembo is currently studying for an MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Met. He was the joint recipient of the Bath Spa Poetry Award in 2016 and has had poems published in Erbacce, Obsessed with Pipework and Domestic Cherry. He is one of eleven poets from across the country who has been selected to take part in the Composers and Poets strand of Leeds Lieder Festival in 2017.