The Handless Maiden

'Thin beautifully etched ice - over such deep shocking water.' 
Ted Hughes

This is a rich, disturbing and vibrant collection of poems...confident, mature and visionary, creating an artistic identity which a great many novelists could only dream of

Whether she is 'in search of the edge' or dancing 'out over the edge' Feaver brings areas of female sexuality and its taboos to the public imagination of women and men with brilliance, sensitivity and perfect control

Vicki Feaver's poems resonate with truth and raw emotion... Whether she is writing about ironing, childhood, periods or love, her wry humour and sensuous style make familiar subject matter seem fresh and new

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.

The Book of Blood

The long-awaited third collection from one of England's finest women poets.

Everyday subjects resonate with truth and humour, but beneath the beautiful words are deep, dark and shocking truths

Vicki Feaver's poems always come back to contemporary relationships - not so much domestic as domestic gothic, where the women are sensual and murderous. These are powerfully distinctive poems, women's poems that don't shut out men

Feaver’s best poems offer a disquietingly direct apprehension of the powers by which we are made and driven

Vicki Feaver was born in Nottingham in 1943 and studied at Durham and University College, London. She has published two previous collections, Close Relatives (1981) and The Handless Maiden (1994).

Split between dark and light, this book records the dichotomy of human experience with unflinching force and clarity. It deals with break-up, depression, illness and death. But it also reveals an intense involvement with nature and a capacity for healing and love. There are intimate personal poems reflecting on relationships with people and creatures; poems which enter the lives of real and imaginary characters, Keats and Medea and Blodeuwedd, for example; and also poems which engage with paintings and political events. 
 
Set in a territory which connects child with adult, myth with reality, the personal with the universal, the book shows a poet fully open to the richness and possibilities of the world but also aware of its violence and pain, not as a remote observer but as someone who is a part of it.

Vicki Feaver

The title of Vicki Feaver’s remarkable new collection derives from Blake’s illustration of a child standing with one foot on a ladder to the moon, crying ‘I want! I want!’ In the title poem it represents her childhood ambition to be a poet; in another, she rejects pressure towards achievement and longs to return to the sensual world of the earth. 
 
This startlingly honest book follows the ladder of a life for seventy-five years, in poems that show how much is connected. Unlocking the voice of a silenced, powerless girl, Feaver writes about an apparently stable childhood which, to her, was painfully insecure: tormented with parental expectations and sibling jealousy, torn between mother and grandmother. The eleven-year-old who wanted to become a poet becomes the woman ‘buried under ice with words burning inside’, who becomes the old woman still ‘searching for words’ – fearful now of memory loss and a failing body. 
 
I Want! I Want! is the work of a poet looking for a pattern in her life before it’s too late. Urgent, accessible and deeply moving, this is poetry of witness and survival: a vivid testament to the triumph of a poet’s spirit.

Vicki Feaver

Books by Vicki Feaver

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