The Yellow Kite is Vicki Feaver’s first collection since she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s: a series of poems that deal unflinchingly with her condition – she adopts the moniker ‘Shaking Woman’ and looks the disease straight in the eye, as enemy, as friend, as an entity to be explored. The total lack of self-pity, the wit and the curiosity temper any grumpiness. There is beauty too.
One of Vicki’s poems is listed below. Vicki also allowed the Branch to share her poem Ode to Parkinson’s in 2023.
Launch Details
Tuesday 27 May at 6.30pm. Fruitmarket Gallery, Market Street, Edinburgh. All welcome.
Vicki will read, and there will be music from the Self-Righteous Brothers.
The Hot Flannel
Some mornings she looks
in the bathroom mirror
and holds a hot flannel
to her face for a moment
of blind unknowing:
her tremors gone
and, flannel peeled away,
the tracks sorrow
and pain have etched
on her face, erased.
Vicki Feaver was born in Nottingham in 1943 and studied at Durham and University College, London. She has published four collections:
- Close Relatives (Secker, 1981)
- The Handless Maiden (Cape, 1994), which won a Heinemann Award
- The Book of Blood (Cape, 2006), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize and Costa Award for Poetry
- I Want, I Want (Cape, 2019). She received a Cholmondeley Award in 1999.
Formerly Professor of Creative Writing at Chichester University, Vicki has lived in Scotland for over 25 years.
If you are unable to attend, but would like to order a copy of The Yellow Kite (ISBN 978 1 0686756 5 2 – cost £9.00), the publishers are Mariscat Press, 10 Bell Place, Edinburgh EH3 5HT. You can order by cheque, made payable to the publishers at this address. Or you do a BACS transfer to: Bank of Scotland / Sort code 80 15 59 / Account no. 00413102
