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"Milk Fever" is a prize-winning first collection from a new voice in contemporary British poetry. The poet's former career as a television scriptwriter for young adults is evident in the fresh, unguarded and intimate address that moves seamlessly between tenderness and brutality in poems largely concerning experiences of motherhood: the joy, the passion and the delight of this unique mother-child dyad paired with shadowy twins - terror, despair and rage.
The poems are urgent and sensual, even when mothers are not human beings: an eagle, a copper mine and a windmill are all given a maternal voice in a collection which searches the world for reunion with a lost other; a lost mother perhaps, or as in the Persephone and Demeter myth, a lost daughter.
The poems travel through Chile, Italy, Russia, ancient Greece, Argentina and France in an attempt to explore the timeless and universal relationship, or variants of it, we all have with our mothers, the relationship that is the blueprint for all our future relationships. This is a collection for, against and about mother, for all that she is and everything we try to pretend she isn't.
List of contents
Riptide Fitzwilliam Selkie Maman Cuttings Be Prepared to Bleed Pomegranate & Pin Strange Fruit Memory in Red Milk Fever Ice Fishing Night Pirate Palm House Holy Water (I) Coppering Mine or Pachamama's Empty Nest Firekeepers Los Ninos Sun Virgin Boy Lightning Girl The Death Collector My American Parents Poem #87 Our Lady Holy Water (II) Communion Call it Love Mummy Sirius Cold Dark Matter Among Women Your Question Confession Confirmation Body Language Mummy Bare Legs Local History Martha Holy Water (III) Cradle Cap Hairball The Desk at Varykino The Wolves at Varykino Ice Recital Ever After Camera Obscura Again Mother as a Windmill Holy Water (IV) Loveblind Fool Idol In Vitro Heuresis Bumble Boy Easter Undone (Not) Penelope's Web I do I undo I redo
About the author
Kaddy Benyon was born and raised in East Anglia. She worked as a television scriptwriter before having children. She has been publishing poetry since 2010 when she was also shortlisted for the Fish Poetry Prize and the inaugural Picador Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in various magazines, websites and anthologies and in 2012 she won the Crashaw Prize, became a Granta New Poet, an Agenda Chosen Young Poet and came third in the Mslexia Poetry Competition. She is currently Invited Poet at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge where she is writing her next collection.
Summary
A prize-winning debut from an exciting new voice in contemporary British poetry. The poems are female-centred and focus on motherhood making this collection an ideal gift for Mothers Day or any other event where a no holds barred exploration of the courage it takes to be a mother is celebrated.
