
Midden Witch
Fiona Benson(Author)
Jonathan Cape (Publisher)
Published on 1. May 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
96 pages
978-1-78733-524-0 (ISBN)
Description
The thrilling story of the healers, artists and prodigies once persecuted as witches - from the three-time T.S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted poet
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
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
Reviews / Votes
These are poems cast as beautiful, intricate spells, reminding us there is more to life than we can hope to explain * Guardian *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Vintage Publishing
Dimensions
Height: 193 mm
Width: 127 mm
Thickness: 12 mm
Weight
118 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-78733-524-0 (9781787335240)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
05/2025
Vintage Digital
€10.99
Available for download
Person
Fiona Benson lives in Devon with her husband and their two daughters. She has published three previous collections of poetry, all of which were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize: Bright Travellers, which won the 2015 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry's Prize for First Full Collection, Vertigo & Ghost, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Rathbones Folio Prize and won both the Roehampton Poetry Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and Ephemeron, which was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the London Hellenic Prize.