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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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