![]() ![]() This method of reworking traditional stories to throw light on gender relations is one that Feaver returns to throughout the collection. Where the frog coerces the ignorant princess into a relationship to obtain his freedom, Feaver's speaker is master of the situation, and the toad her "prisoner". While this foregrounding of the story's sexual subtext substantially alters the texture of it, perhaps the most significant change is that which occurs in the balance of power between the characters. In "Bufo Bufo", for example, she takes the fable of the frog prince and forces its erotic undercurrent to the surface the chaste and persuasive frog is replaced by a "moist and glistening" toad who crouches in silence in the "wet dark" of the speaker's cellar and "at night swells / to the size of a man". Lovers are frequently equated with animals - a mythical association of the sexual and the transgressive that has its roots in fairytale archetypes, but which Feaver develops here. Sexuality, particularly of the liminal, hazardous kind, is omnipresent here. Blood blurs the line between sex and death, as in "The Sacrifice", a poem featuring a bull, in which two maidens lead the mesmerised animal in a highly sexualised dance that climaxes when they take a knife to its throat and the bull "swoons / into its edge, blood falling / in bright gobs on earth / where corn will sprout / green and gold". The imagery throughout is unrepentantly Freudian consider a poem entitled "The Gun", in which the weapon lies on the kitchen table, "polished wood stock / jutting over the edge", causing the marksman's eyes to gleam "like when sex was fresh". ![]() The colour red glows like a beacon through the poems, infusing flowers' petals, staining sheets after sex, darkening to opacity in a dream of a bull, who is tempted by a "bright scarlet" sweater into "meadows slippery / with thick black blood". In this collection, the richly suggestive "blood" of the title conjures a host of elemental ideas - reproduction and inheritance, womanhood, violence, passion - and thus acts as a lens through which Feaver is able to reconsider familiar territory. The combination of technical dexterity, earthy subject matter (a zesty mix of the female, the familial and the mythic) and landscapes alive with flora and fauna alert us to the fact that, after a long absence, we are firmly in Feaver country once more. The labour that has gone into this collection expresses itself as close work, visible in the lacy connections that weave across the surfaces of the poems, in the housekeeperly attention to technique that sees enjambment, internal rhyme and assonance sending ripples of meaning back and forth along the lines. Feaver does not deal in spectacles the scope of her poems lies in the density of their interiors, not their epic scale. Those expecting an explosive return will, however, be disappointed. Fans of her distinctive brand of darkly domestic poetry have necessarily grown used to waiting happily, with The Book of Blood, Feaver repays their patience with interest. This collection, which sees her shortlisted alongside Seamus Heaney for the 2006 Forward prize, is only her third in 25 years it comes after a gap of more than a decade since her second collection (which itself followed 13 years after her debut, back in 1981). Vicki Feaver's reputation far exceeds her output. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |