Feaver, Vicki

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FEAVER, Vicki


Nationality: British. Born: Vicki Turton, Nottingham, 14 November 1943. Education: University of Durham, B.A. (honors) 1962, and University of London, M.A. 1982. Family: Married William Andrew Feaver in 1960 (divorced); three daughters, one son. Career: Creative writing instructor, Chichester Institute of Higher Education; British television writer of subtitles for the deaf. Awards: Arvon Competition prize winner, 1992; Forward prize, 1993; Heinemann prize, 1994, for The Handless Maiden; Cholmondeley award.

Publications

Poetry

Close Relatives. London, Secker and Warburg, 1981.

The Handless Maiden. London, Cape Poetry, 1994.

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Critical Studies: By Philip Gross, in Poetry Review, 84(2), summer 1994; in Poetry Review, 85(1), spring 1995; by the author, in How Poets Work, edited by Tony Curtis, Bridgend, Seren, 1996.

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I first encountered Vicki Feaver's poetry in the Tate Gallery Anthologies, in which poems are paired with paintings. Feaver's "Oi Yoi Oi" was paired with Roger Hilton's painting of the same name. The immediate impression of Feaver's poem, like that of the painting, is of one of energy and movement:

   The lady has no shame.
   Wearing not a stitch
   she is lolloping across
   an abstract beach
   towards a notional sea.

The poem catches the spirit of the painting beautifully.

The same can be said of another Feaver poem, this one about a deeply contrasting painting, Lucian Freud's near still life Naked Girl with an Egg. Energy also intrudes here, but this time it is in the portrayal of the act of painting itself:

   his brush
   slithering over lustrous flesh,
   the coarse dark hair between her legs,
   like a tongue seeking salt.

It is a poem in which energy and sensuality are splendidly interrelated.

Indeed, energy and the physical enjoyment of life are the hallmarks of many of Feaver's poems. Domestic subjects, as in "Ironing," throb with images of movement and physical involvement:

   I used to iron everything
   my iron flying over sheets and towels
   Like a sledge chased by wolves over snow.

Feaver's poetry revels in a joyous embrace of life itself and celebrates with the reader a fundamentally real world of sensual pleasures, as in "Ruben's Bottom"—"in my rawness, named Flesh."

Another thread running through Feaver's poetry is that of the stuff of legend and folklore. There are biblical heroines such as Judith and Esther and other stories deep in the Western tradition, such as those of Circe and of the handless maiden. Feaver's poems bring to such subjects the immediacy of feeling and emotion:

   And I cried for my hands that sprouted
   in the red-orange mud—the hands
   that write this, grasping
   her curled fists.

In addition, Feaver creates and celebrates her own domestic folklore out of the home truths and mythology of everyday life—of wasps, ironing, menstruation, wood pigeons, and a grandmother dying. It is an acceptance of a world of wonder in the ordinary fabric of life, informed by a cheerful energy of purpose and illuminated by the forces of imagination and verbal energy that make it the stuff of poetry.

John Cotton

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