The Handless Maiden
  • Published: 1 June 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446483787
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 64

The Handless Maiden

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'Thin beautifully etched ice - over such deep shocking water.'
Ted Hughes

The poems in this extraordinary book deal in familiar emotions - love, grief, rage, loneliness - but do so with such a fresh and fierce eye, such lived intensity, that the familiar is given again the force to touch our nerves, to seem raw and new. Some of the poems are based in the territory of home and childhood, others move into that unnerving space where the safe and polite world plunges over a ledge - into anarchic revisions of what is possible or acceptable. They treat myths and fairy stories, or even paintings, not as fictions but as part of our continuing experience. Powerful and sensuous, wry and witty, their clear voice stays in the mind: provoking, questioning, refusing to accept the soft lie. These disturbing and passionate poems demand to be read.
  • Published: 1 June 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446483787
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 64
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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

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Praise for The Handless Maiden

This is a rich, disturbing and vibrant collection of poems...confident, mature and visionary, creating an artistic identity which a great many novelists could only dream of

Michael Bracewell, Guardian

Whether she is 'in search of the edge' or dancing 'out over the edge' Feaver brings areas of female sexuality and its taboos to the public imagination of women and men with brilliance, sensitivity and perfect control

Deryn Rees Jones, London Magazine

Vicki Feaver's poems resonate with truth and raw emotion... Whether she is writing about ironing, childhood, periods or love, her wry humour and sensuous style make familiar subject matter seem fresh and new

Kate Figes,, Cosmopolitan