Midden Witch

The thrilling story of the healers, artists, and prodigies once persecuted as witches - from the three-time T.S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted poet.

Midden Witch is the Poetry Book Society Choice.

In her thrilling fourth collection, Midden Witch, 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.

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.

In Midden Witch, 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.

'Benson is one of the finest English poets writing today' - Blake Morrison

'No one writes the way Fiona Benson does. No one is as raging, as fearless' - Daisy Johnson

'A new collection of Benson's wise and vivid work is a real occasion... exciting... fully inhabited and multi-faceted' - Guardian