Poems of violence and motherhood, told through a brutal and compelling evocation of Zeus Nothing in Fiona Benson’s fine 2014 debut collection _Bright Travellers_ prepared us for this. After a premonitory poem about puberty (“Sex wasn’t here yet, but it was coming”), _Vertigo & Ghost_ explodes into furious life with a series of poems and fragments about the Greek god Zeus and what some sources have referred to as his “erotic escapades”. No such weasel words for Benson, whose Zeus is a serial rapist, eating women like air, in jagged, staccato poems that shoot down the pages like lightning bolts. “Rape is rarely / what you think. / Sometimes you are / outside yourself / looking down / thinking slut / as you let him / do what he wants / on your own familiar sheets / to stop the yelling / and the backhand to the face / and the zeroing in / of the fist.” The poems record Zeus’s and other gods’ relations with mortals and nymphs, including those – Io, Cyane, Daphne – who undergo transformation in the Greek myths, though here the metamorphosis becomes an attempt to hide from their rapist or the post-traumatic change they suffer after him. Callisto “holds herself down, clamps her mouth, / piles on flesh like upholstery” while “Daphne is a hare / trying to leap free”. Other anonymous voices are heard too, reporting rape in relationships (“How light I was. / How doubtfully safe”) and we even get Zeus himself, who speaks in screaming italics with bitter comedy: “_NO FUN / THIS ANKLEBAND / TAZERS ME / EVERY TIME / I BRUSH THE BOUNDS / AND YET IT IS / SHALL WE SAY / EROTIC?_” As that poem makes clear, this is a timeless, universal Zeus, though it’s only when Benson makes specific contemporary references – to the sexual assult trial of Brock Turner or to Donald Trump (“I LOVE THIS PRESIDENT. / HIS SHINY GOLD TOWER”) – that she seems to strain for effect. But overall this extraordinary cacophony of voices (Ted Hughes’s _Crow_ rewritten by Anne Carson) is an addictive, thrilling, sickening experience. Continue reading...
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