Milk Fever (Salt Modern Poets). This item is unavailable.Milk Fever (Salt Modern Poets)

"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 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 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.

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.