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The Handless Maiden

The Handless Maiden

 

Vicki Feaver’s second poetry collection The Handless Maiden (1994) brings together forty-four poems. Three have won prizes: ‘Teddy Bears’ in the National Poetry Competition in 1981; ‘Lily Pond’ in the Arvon Competition in 1992 and ‘Judith’ won a Forward Prize in 1993.

For twenty years this book has mattered to me. I return to it to reread the lines I know are there. Its experience and longevity make me determined to be courageous with my own imagery and writing. 

Feaver lets us face the fact that love changes, people can be cruel and the shortest exchanges between people can mean the very most. We are reminded that being human is a journey and the paths we take are crossed with pain and loss. This is tempered with the joy found in works of art and the moments when our relationships make us laugh and smile at shared experiences.

I chuckle to myself as I imagine who I might wish to be chased naked across the beach by and I am pleased that there is a poem to accompany Roger Hilton’s 1963 painting, Oi Yoi Yoi. “Swinging baroque tits” offers a succinct description of the breasts on display in the painting and of the earthiness of the imagined moment. As a writer I find myself weighing up the word choices such as tits not breasts, lolloping not dancing and enjoy the reminder that the reader can tell when it’s right and the writer needs to reflect and redraft to get it so.

I enter the poems sometimes delighted, sometimes relieved because someone else knows what it’s like. The poems resonate with me and I read each one eagerly to devour the whole of it and then reread slowly to savour the detail. This is how I would like readers to approach my poetry. I strive for the accurate depiction of a feeling and want my readers to recognise it, empathise with it and occasionally be shocked by a brutal reality.

The sadness of ‘The Crack’ comes when we realise that both parties knew the distance between them in their relationship was widening, but did not talk of it. Was this the fault line that caused the conversion to “crumpledness” in ‘Ironing’? The almost uncontrollable newfound feelings of puberty which surprise the young girl in ‘Rope’ are vividly given life. The comparison with “featherless chicks – all claws and beaks and black-veined wings – that dropped from gutters” adds a shocking fragility and vulnerability. The shock on the gym teacher’s face if all was revealed can be vividly pictured and I am transported back to my own discovery of the workings of a pubescent body.  ‘Teddy Bears’ reassures me that I am not the only person who has viewed things through the eyes of a toy. The bears silently see aspects of a woman’s relationship that would not have been visible to them had they still been relegated to the cupboard. How powerful for the bears to offer a humorous and reassuring view of sex with a new lover in between the sadness of past love lost and the anxiety of starting a relationship.

There is much to admire and aspire to in The Handless Maiden and if my own poetry were to have a similar lasting impact on someone else I would know I had achieved my goal.

Sue Finch (June 2014)

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