Vicki Feaver moved to Dunsyre, South Lanarkshire in 2000. She previously taught creative writing at the University of Chichester where she is now Emeritus Professor. She has published three collections of poetry, Close Relatives (Secker 1981), and The Handless Maiden (Cape 1994) and The Book of Blood (Cape 2006), both short-listed for the Forward Prize Best Collection, with The Book of Blood also shortlisted for the 2006 Costa (formerly Whitbread) Poetry Book Award. Her poem ‘Judith’ won the Forward Prize for the Best Single Poem. She has also received a Heineman Prize, a Hawthornden Fellowship, an Arts Council Award and a Cholmondeley Award.

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Related links

› Vicki Feaver on Poetry Archive

› Vicki Feaver on www.contemporarywriters.com

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Books I love

An old favourite
'It has to be William Blake. He was the first poet I discovered as a child; the poet who inspired me to be a poet. I’m hopeless at learning poems by heart: but poems like ‘O Rose that art sick’ and ‘Ah Sunflower weary of time’ have stuck in my head. I recite them to myself when I can’t sleep at night.'

A new favourite
'I was in America recently and picked up Jane Kenyon’s Collected Poems (Greywolf Press, 2005) in a bookshop. It was expensive - I hesitated over buying it! But I’m so glad I did. The poems have been haunting me like a spell – lyrical, lucid, surprising poems that chart the moods of nature and of the poet’s mind.'

A current interest
'I’ve just begun a three-day a week drawing and painting course at Leith School of Art. Trying to capture the rhythms and inner nature of objects we’ve already made connections with poets like Rilke and Hopkins. It’s a process that hopefully will bring me deeper into finding a language in my poems that comes closer to making a connection between the sensual and spiritual, the thing felt and the thing thought.'

Vicki Feaver, September 2006

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Featured poem

Glow-worm

Talking about the chemical changes
that make a body in love shine,
or even, for months, immune to illness,
you pick a grub from the lawn
and let it lie on your palm – glowing
like the emerald-burning butt
of a cigarette.

(We still haven’t touched,
only lain side by side
the half stories of our half lives.)

You call them lightning bugs
from the way the males gather in clouds
and simultaneously flash.

This is the female, fat from a diet
of liquefied snails, at the stage in her cycle
when she hardly eats; when all her energy’s
directed to drawing water and oxygen
to a layer of luciferin.

Wingless, wordless,
in a flagrant and luminous bid
to resist the pull to death, she lifts
her shining green abdomen
to signal yes, yes.

Vicki Feaver
from The Book of Blood (Jonathan Cape, 2006)