1974
by Vicki Feaver
The year Anne Sexton
sat in her red Cougar
with a glass of vodka
behind the closed doors
of her garage and drifted off
to its purring lullaby
in her mother’s fur coat.
The year I read Emily Dickinson:
‘This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then, the letting go –’
‘What do you do?’
a man asked me at a party.
‘What do you do in the afternoons?’
I was thirty-one:
the same age as Plath
when she turned on the gas.
‘I’m a poet!’ I lied
jolting myself to life:
a woman buried under ice
with words burning inside.
From I Want! I Want!. Reproduced with kind permission from Jonathan Cape.
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best Collection 2020
I Want! I Want!
Vicki Feaver
About Vicki Feaver
Vicki Feaver (b. 1943, Nottingham) stole a copy of Blake’s poems from her parents’ bookshelf as a child and, reading it in bed by torchlight, developed a secret ambition to become a poet. Much of that early encounter went into I Want! I Want! – the title is from Blake’s engraving, showing a child clambering towards the moon on a ladder, and speaks to Feaver’s themes of female ambition and desire. The sections of the book are separated by ladder motifs; Feaver describes testing her editor’s patience by insisting ‘they were drawn with just the right degree of wobbliness’.
A new collection from Feaver is a rare event; this is only her fourth in forty years. A poem from her 1993 collection The Handless Maiden won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. She is an Emeritus Professor at University College, Chichester.
Hear Vicki Feaver read on The Poetry Archive.
Forward Prizes History:
- 2006 Forward Prize for Best Collection, shortlisted for The Book of Blood (Cape)
- 1994 Forward Prize for Best Collection, shortlisted for The Handless Maiden (Jonathan Cape)
- 1993 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem ‘Judith’ (Independent on Sunday)
