‘Poetry is a strong way out’: Places of care in Vicki Feaver’s The Book of Blood

The epigraph introducing Vicki Feaver’s third collection The Book of Blood is a quote from Stevie Smith, a poet whom Feaver has claimed in an interview was a decisive influence on her becoming a poet:

The human creature is alone in his carapace. Poetry is a strong way out. The passage out that she blasts is often in splinters, covered with blood…

(Stevie Smith)

‘The thick scent of blood’, that is ‘the little burp / and bubble that begins her flow’ is a central motif in the collection, becoming radiant with associations that are used to explore and voice ideas of femininity. Feaver seems to agree that ‘the passage out’ is a necessarily bloody or messy one for women poets who look to make a space for their voice in a tradition that has largely, and often aggressively, excluded them. By this I mean much must be re-visioned and re-imagined from a woman’s point of view. Even today, it is impossible for women to be indifferent to this imbalance even if they resent being labeled ‘women poets’. This has been successfully addressed and redressed through writers such as Carol Ann Duffy and Angela Carter through the unpicking and rewriting of fairy tales, mythic imagery and the voicing of passive female subjects of often canonical paintings. It is an approach that Feaver has supported in this collection with poems such as ‘Girl in Red’, ‘The Gift’, ‘Medea’s Little Brother’, ‘The Red Cupboard’ and ‘The Fates’ as well as famously in her previous book, The Handless Maiden, with the poem ‘Judith’ (Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, 1993), as well as ‘Oi yoi yoi’, and the title poem. The former draws on two versions of a fairy tale that fascinated Feaver, which she has discussed in an interview with Vicci Bentley (‘No More ‘Mrs. Nice’, Magma No.13, Winter 1998). The story concerns a girl whose hands are cut off by her father and then replaced with silver ones by the king after he falls in love with her. Her real hands grow back when she finally leaves with her child and goes into the forest:

In Grimm’s version of this story the woman’s hands grow back because she’s good for seven years. But in a Russian version they grow as she plunges her arms into a river to save her drowning baby. (V. Feaver, The Handless Maiden)

Feaver’s interpretation of the tale seems to be one that recognizes women’s special relationship with nature to be a potential source of renewal and empowerment:

I let myself cry. I cried for my hands

my father cut off; for the lumpy, itching scars

of my stumps; for the silver hands –

my husband gave me – that spun and wove

but had no feeling; and for my handless arms

that let my baby drop – unwinding

from the night swaddling cloth

as I drank from the brimming river.

And I cried for my hands that sprouted

in the red-orange mud – the hands

that write this, grasping

her curled fists.

(from ‘The Handless Maiden’)

It is from this empowered place and the gift of hands that The Book of Blood seems to come, with its intimate dialogues with nature and from the places of care we see described in ‘Bats’. And throughout, as in the poem above, the threat of violence, of women seeking revenge for the wrongs done against them – ‘her curled fists’ – always seem to haunt, and often take full charge of the poems. However, the originality of Feaver’s perspective and sensibility seems to lie in how she is able to capture a feminine voice rather than a simply feminist one, as suggested by Vicci Bentley. It is her intellectual as well as sensuous commitment and control evident in her writing that sets her work apart, and gives it a broader and perhaps more difficult obligation to how we live and share the world – as in ‘Bats’, for ‘the mothers who’ve taken over the space/ in the roof,’ in a poem that describes a shared residence:

‘……………...I wanted it

to be mine: to feed it like my daughter

feeds my granddaughter on the choicest

delicacies, to go out into the wet fields

and search for beetles and crane-flies

and moths, to make it a doll’s

soft cot, to rear it with the man

who pulled a sock over his hand

and gently lifted it up, launching it

through the window, returning to the bed

where care is not for the flesh of our flesh

but flesh itself, hands, tongues, the body’s

tenderest morsels, offered from each

to each, shared like food.

Here, we see an obvious care for the relationships between women and the tenderness of mothering but it is articulated through a larger awareness of other lives beyond the human that share many of our concerns and needs. Furthermore, men are allowed into her poetic vision and are also permitted tenderness. Although much of Feaver’s material is preoccupied with breaking taboos and reveling in the strength and vengeful nature of women in both domestic and mythic scenarios, she is also true to the complexity of sexuality for both men and women. In ‘Hemingway’s Hat’, concepts of gender and sex are inverted and shown to be ambiguous:

In our games of changing hats

we float free like those ghosts:

last night, me riding you,

our shared penis

a glistening pillar

sliding between us; this morning,

you washing me, soaping and rinsing

with a woman’s tenderness.

This notion of a ‘shared penis’ attempts to revise ideas of intimacy that have been founded in male-centred representations of sex in literature and culture, formulating women as passive victims of dominant men. This corrects an imbalance in which pleasure and desire belong to both participants, and in which a psychoanalyst might say the poet’s ‘pen’ is now also shared. Feaver is rarely as explicit as this, although many of the poems are galvanized by an erotic tension that broods behind metaphors, creatures and atmospheres. It is often traced by the painterly exuberance of details and colours that pattern the collection as well as helping to generate drama. There is something unexpected and driven about the narratives, that often unfold in an understated and alarming way. This is often achieved through the way the colours described are pushed towards the symbolic as we see in ‘Girl in Red’:

The mood in our house was black

as soft tar at the edges of pavements

I stirred with a stick.

And:

I stole a lipstick –

the sizzling vermilion

that made boys and old men look.

It is this voice that recalls the paintings of Paula Rego in which fraught domestic dramas are represented and tense atmospheres infused with narrative and a pending violence, that is hinted at rather than declared. In Rego’s work as in Feaver’s, women are never quite what they seem. Rego’s women are strong and dominant, taking up much of the pictorial space. Their gaze is often confrontational and threatening in contrast to men, whose features are often not shown, facing inward into the scene. Similarly, it is the women who act, who murder and transform themselves in Feaver’s poetry. Feaver is able to imagine and communicate places of care and intimacy within a woman’s experience as well as their ability to take revenge, to resist those that ‘wanted her tame, faithful, grateful’ with a writing that is at once luminous, subtle and vibrant. ‘Pills’ is exemplary of a consciousness that is finding its place and unique vision of the world:

After a few days,

when the mist rolled back, she’d strain her neck

craning to comprehend the blue space

birds moved in, filled

with twitterings and cries.

She’d kneel on the lawn,

skirt soaked, rediscovering

the shades of grass: each blade –

like the seconds lost –

separate, sharp, drawing blood

from her thumb. She’d gaze at oranges

as people gaze at statues of Christ

on the Cross: the brilliant rinds –

packed with juice, flesh, pips –

exploding like grenades,

like brains, like trapped gases

at the surface of the sun.

Laura Helyer has a background in ballet and art history. Along with pursuing her own poetry, she is also a PhD student in the School of English at the University of St Andrews.