Fiona Benson

Fiona Benson Poems

Fiona Benson Biography

Fiona Benson (born 1978) is an English poet. Benson was born in Wroughton, England.She received her Master of Letters and PhD in English from Saint Andrew’s University, Scotland, where she wrote her dissertation on the Ophelia figure in Early Modern Drama. Benson was included in Faber New Poets (2009) and her debut collection, Bright Travellers was published in 2014 by Cape Poetry Benson received the Eric Gregory Award and the Faber New Poets Award in 2006. [citation needed] In 2015, Benson was awarded the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize)

The Best Poem Of Fiona Benson

Unaccompanied

It's raining at the garden centre.
I walk through dripping aisles of potted herbs
in a cool green rinse of aniseed and catmint.

The water falls in diatonic intervals -
each drop calls out its one clear note
as the canopy of leaves sings counterpoint.

I want you here to listen that way you do
with your eyes half-closed and mouth a little tense,
but don't come and get you. Instead, I rehearse

this trick of solitary listening
against the time you leave, like a beginner
at piano with the practice pedal down

crawling a way through the minor scale
until my fingers have it blind.
But, like listening with one ear sealed,

it misses a dimension, or depth of sound…
the rain taps shallow as a glockenspiel,
an infant music, untutored and unreal.

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