An Inheritance of Magic

Pascal Petit’s ninth collection, Beast, is a journey through many landscapes (the Amazon, the French wetlands, the Tala Zone reserve). Although the book is divided into segments named after separate locations, many of the poems feature multiple landscapes. For instance, in ‘House of Puberty’, a Welsh mining village contains Amazonian jungle in the process of being deforested. Eco-poetics is at the centre of this collection. Petit’s concern for the environment and her exploration of trauma are inextricably linked: the damage to the earth around us and the damage that the speaker endured throughout her childhood are branches of the same tree.

In Beast, Petit builds on work she started in some of her earlier collections. There is a sense that the speaker is reaching for catharsis, but this time with the knowledge that such catharsis may not be possible. In ‘Letter to Muriel’ (one of the longest poems in the book), the speaker seems to reframe everything she has previously said about her mother by addressing her directly: ‘Let me try again, dear Maman, now I know / your name means archangel Muriel’. The speaker travels through her mother’s life, trying to engage but never able to truly manage it. She reimagines the angels that her mother hallucinates as insects. She tells her: ‘It’s just a snowy tree cricket / I tell you, but you say it’s the angel Muriel’. Even when mother and child try to connect, they are divided by the very different ways they see the world. The speaker finishes the poem by concluding, ‘I’m trying to love you now, mother’, but there is a great pathos here as the speaker’s mother is already dead, so even if she were to succeed in seeing the world though her mother’s eyes, it would not bring them closer.

The speaker’s father inhabits the role of stalker, killer, and collector of dead animals in the book, as in ‘The Lammergeier’s Daughter’ where the speaker ‘saw at once / that you hunted everything I loved’. When he does appear as an animal, he is a predator, a beast: ‘his head / haloed with flies and mosquitoes’ (‘Camargue Bull at Dusk’). Even as she describes his current frailty, the speaker never forgets his monstrous past: ‘Could I have tamed my Papa? Led on the leash // of an oxygen tube’ (‘The Tarasque Tattoo’). This figure of frailty is the one the speaker can neither forgive nor truly punish. She understands the trauma her father put her through even though she blocks out the memory of it:

                I don’t know what happens while
I’m airborne, or where my father’s trophy cat

takes me, but when I return there’s always blood
under my nails and around my mouth,
my skin peeled off and folded in his drawer. 
                   (‘Skinner’)

In ‘Tala Zone’, a long prose-poem sequence, the speaker returns to the cellar her father tormented her in as a child, on the cusp of his death. The cellar becomes the Tala Zone reserve in Madhya Pradesh, India. However, the geography of the cellar is constantly changing as she moves through it; the many damaged animals she encounters are emblematic of both the damage her father has done to her and the damage mankind has done to the world.

The final sections of this collection ask what is left for the speaker now that both her parents are dead and she has the rest of her life left to live. The child she could have had if her life had been different is the focus of ‘A Mother Sings’, whilst the ensuing poem, ‘What the Eagle Saw’, focuses on the scale of the damage of the earth. Personal damage and global ecological damage both stem from the same root. In ‘Roebuck’ she imagines a symbolic rebirth, whilst in ‘Ode to a Cornish Hedge’ she begs, ‘Let me be in earth’s childhood again.’ Although the poems in the final two sections are slightly weaker than those in the earlier three, there are some excellent poems here. 

In Petit’s final poem, ‘Beast of Bodmin’, the speaker is reborn as the mythical Beast of Bodmin, and in the act of rebirth she becomes a creator of a new world, boasting her many epic acts: ‘I am the codex of unnamed species, the librarian of lost trees.’ It is a powerful conclusion to a collection that is just as wild as the beasts that populate it, allowing the speaker to find a space for herself within the menagerie as ‘the curator of my own heaven’.

The sharp, autobiographical edge that is so unapologetic and bold in Beast is drawn with a lighter touch in Midden Witch by Fiona Benson. Benson brings to this collection that same clever, pared-back imagery which has become a trademark of hers. A ‘midden’ is an archaic term for a heap of animal or human waste. Throughout this collection, Benson explores that which was discarded: the people who were persecuted for witchcraft, as well as the old traditions of magic. There is a personal focus to this collection, of the inheritance of womanhood and the intrinsic magic and witchcraft the speaker passes down to her daughters.

Midden Witch is a feminist collection, but Benson does not fall into the trap of suggesting that accusations of witchcraft were only made against women. In the poem ‘North Berwick Witch Trials’, Benson chooses to explore the trial from the perspective of Dr John (John Fian, a Scottish schoolmaster executed as a warlock) rather than any of the women accused. In the actual North Berwick witch trials, several witches were accused of raising storms to sink the fleet of King James VI and I as he returned to Scotland with his wife, Anne of Denmark. This poem is a moving tribute to Fian and reaches back in time to honour him for not accusing any others of witchcraft, even under torture: ‘I think I am a coward and would have spilled out many names but he made sure to burn alone’, the speaker confesses.

The poems in this second section (‘Persecution’) move between elegies for those accused of witchcraft and portraits of their accusers (such as the witch-hunter Matthew Hopkins). In the eyes of the accusers, witchcraft is a way to understand the terrible things that happen to people. In ‘Amy Duny’, Benson’s speaker places herself alongside the accused: ‘I put on my own toad skin, sit with her in the ash and scream, and scream’. With the advantage of retrospect, the speaker can see the injustice of Amy Duny’s execution, whilst those around her at the time could only see a witch. This poem elegises the eponymous elderly widow who, along with her neighbour, the widow Rose Cullender, was accused in the 1662 Bury St Edmunds witch trials of bewitching thirteen young children and causing one death. Both women were executed. I provide this additional biographical information to honour Amy Duny, as Benson has in her book.

Due to these specific elegies, ‘Persecution’ was the section I found most moving, but each section was powerful and explored a different aspect of witchcraft, e.g. ‘Herbals’, ‘Exorcisms’, ‘Familiars’, and ‘Folk Tales’. I felt a pang of disappointment at the end of each section which was replaced by excitement as I started the next. The collection is like a doll’s house, with every section a different little room. The opening section, ‘A Discovery of Witchcraft’, was like the porch of the house: it did a brilliant job of both situating the reader and introducing the scope of the collection.

A poem from the first part which introduces the theme of this collection is ‘Jenny Greenteeth’, in which an accused witch becomes the river hag Jenny Greenteeth (otherwise known as Ginny Greenteeth or Wicked Jenny). She is transformed into her role through her persecution by others:

               And what did we fill her with,
this little jug, this girl-shaped pitcher? What did we
fill her with, but hunger and neglect and how to be cruel –
and it’s too late to be sorry now – though we’re sorry now
she calls our children to the water and holds them down.

This speaker struggles with a theme of the collection: the tension between their pity for the persecuted and the truth that some of those persecuted are not hated without good reason.

Overall, the central speaker is not distanced but continually draws herself to the surface. Whilst this sometimes feels brilliant, it doesn’t always work. I found the poem ‘Winter Lockdown’ out of place, as it was a still and meditative poem in the middle of five wild and visceral exorcisms, such as in the section opener ‘Rite’ where the speaker concludes she must: ‘Evict the bitch, no matter / how she writhes and spits, / cast all my demons out.’ In ‘Winter Lockdown’, the speakers measured reaction to COVID and ‘its othering of the world’ didn’t fit tonally, even though it had similar themes of motherhood and resistance.

The intersection between the grand scale of some of the poems and the personal focus of others is what makes the collection so special. In the rousing final poem, ‘Spirit Midden with Slow Worm & Snake’, the speaker situates herself in a history of magic, a history of motherhood. The final stanza is both intimate (‘in her address to her daughters’) and grand: ‘How can I tell you daughters – / we are always looking for the counter-spell, / the correct deflection’. By the end of the poem, the speaker claims the title of ‘witch’ for herself: a well-earned title, as Midden Witch is a kind of magic.

Mona Arshi’s new collection Mouth is the best one I have read this year. Arshi effortlessly interlaces the modern and the ancient, the visceral with the quiet and still, the personal and the global. It is a testament to her skill as a poet that nothing feels out of place. It was as if I was in the hands of an expert filmmaker instead of a writer: the camera pans across continents and centuries, the lens zooms in and out. By the end of the collection I felt as if I had travelled a million miles and yet my feet had never left the ground.

‘Palace’, the second section of the collection, is a particular highlight. Like both Petit and Benson, Arshi is exploring the persecution of women – she is especially interested in how women are affected by conflict. I have read many poems reimagining Ancient Greek classics, but they are not often so vibrant and clever as this. In ‘Antigone’s Raag’, Arshi plays with the word ‘raag’, which recalls both raga, a melodic framework for improvisation in Indian classical music, and rag, a piece of rag-time music, a style known for its syncopated and ‘ragged’ rhythms. Rag-time music often involves a remixing, whilst ragas often involve the changing and flowing of a given set of notes on a scale. ‘Antigone’s Raag’ is a remix, where the speaker talks about the constraints of her myth knowingly, such as in the second stanza when she says: ‘I ask the shoulder of the mountain /   what to do about the chorus.’ Familiarity with the Iliad and Antigone would help the reader’s understanding of the poems in this section, but the figures of these myths are drawn so clearly that background knowledge is not essential.

Arshi previously worked in human rights law before her career as a poet, and she brings into her writing an understanding of war and conflict. Her familiarity with the asylum system is apparent. In her poem ‘Antigone Addresses the High Court of Justice’, she writes: ‘I was, as they say, on my own. My lawyer hadn’t shown up’. Due to cuts to legal aid, an increasing number of asylum seekers are forced to come to tribunal hearings unrepresented; a 2025 report by Jo Wilding for Justice Together states that: ‘In England and Wales there is a gap of at least 57% between legal aid provision and eligible asylum legal aid need’ (‘No Access to Justice 2’). Although these poems reference the Classics, make no mistake that in her work Arshi is commenting directly on our own society.

It is hard to pick out a specific standout poem from the collection, as all the work was so strong. ‘Arrivals’ was a particular favourite of mine, where the dead arrive:

the perfumed dead
     on that long road
the rain spitting from

a sideways direction
     why should there
not be rain

by and by
    and why shouldn’t
birds still

stamp for worms
    whilst cat’s-eyes blink
in the distance

There is a remarkable softness in Arshi’s work. The poems in this collection don’t feel like they are written too strictly to a particular theme, but instead explore conflict, trauma, familial relationships. Each new poem feels like both a surprise and a continuance of something: an idea from another poem, a feeling, a revelation. I can see myself re-reading this collection once or twice a year for many years to come.