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.