The Book of Blood
  • Published: 15 April 2006
  • ISBN: 9780224076845
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 80
  • RRP: $29.99

The Book of Blood

Formats & editions
EBook
31 May 2011
Paperback
15 Apr 2006
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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.
  • Published: 15 April 2006
  • ISBN: 9780224076845
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 80
  • RRP: $29.99
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About the author

Vicki Feaver

Vicki Feaver was born in Nottingham in 1943 and studied at Durham and University College, London. She has published three previous collections, Close Relatives (1981), The Handless Maiden (1994) and The Book of Blood (2006), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize and Costa Award for Poetry. She received the W.H. Heinemann Award in 1994 and the Cholmondeley Award in 1999.

portrait photo of Vicki Feaver

Also by Vicki Feaver

I Want! I Want!
The Handless Maiden
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Praise for The Book of Blood

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

Feaver’s best poems offer a disquietingly direct apprehension of the powers by which we are made and driven

Sean O'brein, The Independent
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