Midnight, early February. Moonlight, trapped
between the snow still falling and the white earth,
is luminous from our sloped roof to the firs
that edge the common land. In the white curve
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‘What would I give / to be one of those swimmers in all this snow, / swallowed by the cold and the night’s strange radiance?’
Midnight, early February. Moonlight, trapped
between the snow still falling and the white earth,
is luminous from our sloped roof to the firs
that edge the common land. In the white curve
Sign in to Granta.com.
‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
Fiona Benson’s collection Bright Travellers, received the 2015 Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for First Full Collection and the 2015 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Her second book, Vertigo & Ghost, is the winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2019, the Roehampton Prize for Best Poetry Colleciton 2019, and is shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2020.
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‘She offered herself in return / for her decimated town.’
‘Oarsman on the Drowning of Nisus’s Daughter Scylla’, ‘Pasiphaë on Her Granddaughter, Apemosyne’ and ‘The Chimp House’ by Fiona Benson.
Two poems by Fiona Benson, whose Vertigo & Ghost is shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2020.
‘days I talked with Zeus / I ate only ice / felt the blood trouble and burn / under my skin’
‘I’ve always wanted to write from the gut, to write instinctively rather than cerebrally.’
‘I head down the path hoping she’ll come / but when I look back she’s gone and my own voice / snags at her name like barbed wire on skin.’
‘Pop songs have the power to make me behave badly, and for the first time in my life I want to do the right thing’
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