The Book of Blood - Vicki Feaver

Vicki Feaver is one of the finest poets currently writing in Scotland, I've heard her read a few times and was interested to read her work on the page for a change. She writes beautifully with a real sense for the sounds and rhythms of language, she uses a lot of subtle internal rhyme. She writes about relationships between men and women and between humans and the environment. I find her attitude to nature often rather disturbing (see the Poetry Thursday post below for more on that!). However her best poetry is truly stunning, like the last poem in the book The Blue Butterfly, where she sees nature in a more pleasant light than she normally does, or in this wonderful extract from Pills, where a woman has come off her medication:

She'd kneel on the lawn,
skirt soaked, rediscovering
the shades of grass; each blade -
like the seconds lost -
separate, sharp., drawing blood
from her thumb. She'd gaze at organges
as people gaze at statues of Christ
on the Cross: the brilliant rinds -
packed with juice, flesh, pips -
exploding like grenades,
like brains, like trapped gases
at the surface of the sun.