Fiona Benson gives us an insight into her new collection Ephemeron, published this month by Cape:
"The third section ‘Translations from the Pasiphaë’ retells the story of Pasiphaë and the birth and life of the minotaur. It reimagines the minotaur as a disabled child. Ancient Greek convention was to expose disabled children. I imagine instead that the healer Pasiphaë (sister to that other famous healer and witch, Circe) chose to keep her son. I try and recentralise Pasiphaë as the powerful Queen at the heart of so many Greek myths and stories, rather than as a culturally debased figure, the woman who slept with a bull; and I explore her husband King Minos’ descent into brutality and slaughter."
Fiona Benson has published two previous collections which were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize: Bright Travellers, which won the 2015 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry's Prize for First Full Collection, and Vertigo & Ghost, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Rathbones Folio Prize and won both the Roehampton Poetry Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Collection.
Join the PBS by 15th February to read our full interview with Fiona Benson in our Spring Bulletin. Complete Members will receive copies of Ephemeron in their Spring book box.