The Book of Blood

(Paperback)

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Description

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

Reviews

Everyday subjects resonate with truth and humour, but beneath the beautiful words are deep, dark and shocking truths * The Herald *
Violence stalks the book -- Colin Waters * Sunday Herald *
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 -- Matthew Sweeney
Feavers best poems offer a disquietingly direct apprehension of the powers by which we are made and driven -- Sean O'brein * The Independent *

Author Bio

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).