The title of Vicki Feaver's remarkable new collection derives from Blake's illustration of a child standing with one foot on a ladder to the moon, crying 'I want! I want!' In the title poem it represents her childhood ambition to be a poet; in another, she rejects pressure towards achievement and longs to return to the sensual world of the earth.

This startlingly honest book follows the ladder of a life for seventy-five years, in poems that show how much is connected. Unlocking the voice of a silenced, powerless girl, Feaver writes about an apparently stable childhood which, to her, was painfully insecure: tormented with parental expectations and sibling jealousy, torn between mother and grandmother. The eleven-year-old who wanted to become a poet becomes the woman 'buried under ice with words burning inside', who becomes the old woman still 'searching for words' - fearful now of memory loss and a failing body.

I Want! I Want! is the work of a poet looking for a pattern in her life before it's too late. Urgent, accessible and deeply moving, this is poetry of witness and survival: a vivid testament to the triumph of a poet's spirit.

A late flowering from one of our finest poets

About the Author
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.


Book Information
ISBN 9781787331815
Author Vicki Feaver
Format Paperback
Page Count 112
Imprint Jonathan Cape Ltd
Publisher Vintage Publishing
Weight(grams) 115g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 130mm * 8mm