Book description
The poems in this extraordinary book deal in familiar emotions - love,
grief, rage, loneliness - but do so with such a fresh and fierce eye,
such lived intensity, that the familiar is given again the force to
touch our nerves, to seem raw and new. Some of the poems are based in
the territory of home and childhood, others move into that unnerving
space where the safe and polite world plunges over a ledge - into
anarchic revisions of what is possible or acceptable. They treat myths
and fairy stories, or even paintings, not as fictions but as part of our
continuing experience. Powerful and sensuous, wry and witty, their clear
voice stays in the mind: provoking, questioning, refusing to accept the
soft lie. These disturbing and passionate poems demand to be read.
Vicki Feaver was born in Nottingham in 1943 and studied at Durham and
University College, London. She has published three collections:
Close Relatives
(1981), The Handless Maiden
(1994), winner of the Heinemann Award and shortlisted for the Forward
Prize, and The Book of Blood
(2006), which was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize and theCosta
Poetry Award. The Handless Maiden
includes the poem 'Judith', winner of the Forward Prize for Best Single
Poem. In 1993 she was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship and in 1999 a
Cholmondeley Award.
