As the poetry demographic, like the general population demographic, trends Homewards and Carewards, you might well hypothesize related trends in its subject-matter. Proportionally fewer new poems, for instance, about sex, pop, casual jobs and feeling zingy with energy. And proportionally more about grandchildren, paintings, gardening – and illness. Parkinson’s is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder after Alzheimer’s and the fastest-growing neurological condition globally, but if there’s been a single-poet collection about it before, I don’t know of one. Vicki Feaver’s new pamphlet is about living with it.
Vicki Feaver is best known for disciplined poems dealing with undisciplined, sometimes violent, emotions – her most famous being about Judith and Holophernes – and Parkinson’s will certainly provoke them. Here it’s like an indwelling demon. In one poem it’s addressed directly: ‘You were in her years/ but waited to show’. In another it becomes the speaker, addressing its victim with sinister glee:
Your voice that you hear
loud and clear in your ear
is to others a mumble
that no repeating
of tongue twisters
or singing up and down
quavery scales
will stop sounding
like a whisper from a coffin.
It makes her shake so much that the shaking feels like her defining attribute: she becomes ‘the shaking woman’. She’s unsteadier – and falls over and breaks a hip. Even taking a bath becomes a risk and struggle. There’s the double-checking of thoughts, conveyed by pantoums. There’s the disruption to self-image:
Who is the woman in the mirror?
Is she the same woman as yesterday?
Why does she always appear?
Why look at me suspiciously?
And especially the difficulty finding words:
A rat that gnawed
through her skull
into her brain
is devouring her words
as if they are grain.
As if that’s not enough, the Covid crisis – ‘a year/ of sickness and death’ – is going on. Nonetheless, she attempts to take what pleasure she can in a circumscribed lifestyle. Her local area, ‘where trees and sea/ meet’, her home ‘hemmed in by hills and spiky firs’, her husband, her dog – those statutory topics of the poetry of senescence get an additional poignancy here not just from the usual perception that death is on the horizon, but that the slope going towards it is going to be so difficult. Flowers, birds, trees, seasons, all normally so profuse in symbolism for this type of poet, are now becoming equivocal, dismissible or minatory. The kingfisher is a mere ‘hunter-killer’. Magpies are ‘just birds/ with a reputation as thieves’. The lapwing makes a disconcerting ‘weep-weep’. A tree in her garden ‘twirls a black lace veil’.
But the book’s structured to suggest a path towards resistance, if not a happy ending. The third person, used at first to signal self-estrangement, moves to ‘I’ later on. There are ‘exercises/ to improve her balance’, and ‘co-careldopa’ – a medication – ‘to keep me moving’. She tries boxing which is ‘good for Parkinson’s’; it’ll ‘give a bully a bloody nose’. There’s a slim motif of revival in the desert. The yellow kite at the end, like ‘a fiery bird’, reminds her of a previous personal crisis, and bolsters her spirit. In all, it’s a book representing the ups and downs and shames and struggles of major morbidity with candidness and not without grim humour, and its similarly plain vocabulary, syntax and theme make it an easy read, but a sobering one.
Guy Russell 12th October 2025
