The Book of Blood by Vicki Feaver
Cape (2006)
66pp, £9.00
ISBN: 0224076841
It has taken twelve years for Vicki Feaver’s third collection, The Book of Blood, to appear. The ‘Blood’ of the title includes the blood of murder, sacrifice, menstruation, ancestry, and of wild creatures shot for food. As in her previous book, The Handless Maiden, she draws on classical mythology and fairytales, paintings, female sexuality, sex and death, but there are new themes here too: love poems, and others dealing with mental illness. This is a wise, wide-ranging, excitingly uneven book, with occasional disappointments, such as ‘Borrowed Dog’ and ‘Spider’.
Women who turn to murder are a recurring theme in both collections. In The Handless Maiden Judith, grieving for her murdered husband, ‘rolled in the ash of the fire/ just to be touched and dirtied/ by something’ (‘Judith’). This idea is picked up in ‘Cinderella’. Feaver’s Cinderella rolls in the ashes then:
I print the shapes of grief
hands
feet
breasts
belly
open mouth
onto fine linen sheets.
This impassioned defiance finds a chillier echo in ‘Blodeuwedd’, a poem based on an ancient Welsh tale, blodeuwedd being the Welsh word for owl (literally, ‘flower face’). The narrator, a woman fashioned out of flowers, tells how she conspired with her lover to murder her husband, then was turned into an owl as punishment:
Sometimes, I lunge at your lighted
windows: printing the glass
with breast, talons,
outstretched wings,
flower face of a desperate girl.
‘Blodeuwedd’ is only one of many poems where people turn into birds or animals, and vice versa. ‘Bufo Bufo’, where the fable of the frog prince is turned on its head, starts as a seemingly straightforward description of a toad in the narrator’s cellar, then we are told that it’s spring, the toad’s mating season: ‘But he’s my prisoner – soft, warty stone// who at night swells/ to the size of a man.’
‘Glow-Worm’ is the first of a dozen love poems at the heart of the book (in both senses). This is a deftly controlled piece, full of assonance and half-rhymes – shine/immune, lawn/palm, butt/cigarette – with rhythms that start to run forward, then are pulled gently back. The charged restraint of the writing, the hints of budding intimacy, and the symbolism of the title all combine to make this probably the sexiest poem in the book. This is Feaver at her best: well worth the wait.
• Reviewed by Dot Cobley. In a fortchcoming anthology Dot Cobley says of herself “I’ve got six different jobs, I attend four assorted poetry groups, and do most of my writing between 5:00 and 6:30am.”
