Midden Witch

<p><b>The thrilling story of the healers, artists and prodigies once persecuted as witches – from the three-time T.S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted poet<br><br>POETRY BOOK SOCIETY CHOICE</b><br><br>In her thrilling fourth collection, <i>Midden Witch</i>, 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.<br><br>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.<br><br>In <i>Midden Witch</i>, 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.<br><br><b>‘Benson is one of the finest English poets writing today’ Blake Morrison</b><br><br><b>‘No one writes the way Fiona Benson does. No one is as raging, as fearless’ Daisy Johnson</b><br><br><b>A new collection of Benson’s wise and vivid work is a real occasion... exciting...fully inhabited and multi-faceted’ <i>Guardian</i></b></p>