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Among the many pleasures of listening to Robert Lowell read, hearing him pronounce ‘My mind’s not right’ in the southern drawl he caught early, and somehow retained, has to rank near the top That voice, its specific inflection, echoes through Fiona Benson’s Vertigo & Ghost, in my head at least, and not only when she nods explicitly towards him, as in her most outright allusion to ‘Skunk Hour’: ‘my mind has been wrong/for a long long time’ (‘Haruspex’) Writing on Lowell, Ian Hamilton noted that, in Life Studies, ‘His inheritance has dwindled to the involuntary habit of expecting from the world what he knows it cannot afford, or searching for heaven when he knows full well that he is confined to hell’     Benson appears to be in a similar bind, although for much of the book, especially its second section, she is talking not so much from hell as from a void – ‘Perhaps this is only/purgatory, sister,/and beyond it, bliss’ (‘Toad’) Above all, this is a book about power and its misuses, the possible response to being prey, or vehicle and that unlikely, hopeful, ‘perhaps’ It’s a book that crackles with manic energy, with institutional power and the absence of free will; a hyperrealist screenplay, superheroic in its visual energies In the first part of the book, Benson’s achievement is to subtly prepare the ground for personal poems which are no less full of injustice, horror or dread than the Wagnerian, mythical opening half She has, by their arrival, tuned our ear to the ledge of terror on which the speakers perch, ensuring that the seemingly domestic, village settings of the second half are, throughout, sites of fear and danger The speaker feels imperilled at home and in the surrounding land, edgy and alert     In ‘Zeus’ the god of gods is first met on a prison visit and his impact is, from the off, physically disastrous to those he encounters: ‘days I talked with Zeus/I ate only ice/felt the blood trouble and burn/under my skin’; we are transported from Olympus to a scene of ‘bullet-proof glass/and a speaker-phone between us’