Poetry review – THE YELLOW KITE: Jennifer Johnson admires Vicki Feaver’s skilful use of poetry to explore the experience of living with life-changing illness
The Yellow Kite
Vicki Feaver
Mariscat Press
ISBN 978-1-0686756-5-2
36pp £9.00
Quite a few years ago I attended an Arvon course where Vicki Feaver was one of the tutors. I got the strong impression then that this poet was not one for shying away from difficult truths and her four books together with this short collection The Yellow Kite have proved me right. The first half of this pamphlet consists of poems specifically about Parkinson’s Disease while the second half deals with a wider variety of subjects (although some references to Parkinson’s do appear here as well).
The straightforward writing style is so powerful that I find myself at times almost believing that I am myself living with Parkinson’s. This level of writing skill is unsurprising considering that Feaver has previously won both the Heinemann and Cholmondeley awards. I want to spend the remainder of the review examining how I think this power has been achieved by analysing a few of the poems in the collection.
The Yellow Kite begins with an epigraph which consists of a few lines from Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking”.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
These lines, familiar to many readers of poetry, set up the subject of Parkinson’s well. The subsequent poems express the relationship between a sufferer and her disease, a theme that is explored from different angles. Some of the viewpoints may surprise such as the first poem “Ode to Parkinson’s”, a poem praising the disease. This poem shows gradual acceptance of Parkinson’s by imagining it as a constant companion. The relationship changes from that of enemy to friend. The poem begins
You began as her enemy:
slowing her steps,
shaking her left arm
and leg, scaring her
with what you’d do next.
The use of mainly one and two syllable words suits the stripped-back basic experience and the alliteration linking ‘slowing’ and ‘steps’ in the second line, ‘shaking’ in the third and ‘scaring’ in the fourth line give emphasis to the constant unwanted results of Parkinson’s. In the second stanza there comes the realisation that both patient and Parkinson’s ‘were locked together/in a wobbly dance.’ There is a change from an initial response in which the body ‘juddered’ when ‘frantic’ towards an accommodation toward a working together.
You got on best
when she took the lead:
moving her body
with sudden speed,
exaggerated slowness
or deliberate force.
The multi-syllabic adjectives ‘exaggerated’ and ‘deliberate’ emphasize the level of conscious effort needed for every movement. In the fifth stanza the effect on the sufferer’s mind is also described and accepted.
Free to roam, it raced
towards catastrophe.
She had to turn it round
to see you as a friend.
In the final stanza some unexpected joy is achieved with the following realisation.
You jolted her awake:
challenging her to live
every minute left to her,
to burst into flower
like a cactus in the desert.
There are several poems about ‘Shaking Woman’: “The Shaking Woman and the Kingfisher”; “The Shaking Woman in the Snow”; and “The Shaking Woman takes a Bath”. The last of these describes trying to get out of a bath but ‘with wrists too weak / to hold her grip, she falls back.’ She then has ‘a vision of her mother / lying helpless at the end,’.
For me the most devastating poem is “Her Lost Words”. The ability to know and use words well is surely a central part of many people’s identity and to feel it slipping away must be terrifying.
Her dog’s search tool was his nose.
Hers the faulty circuitry of a brain
that lost words and found them
and lost them again, as if the inside
of her head was a shaken snow-globe
where words, mingling with the storm
of whirling flakes, settled randomly,
revealing some and burying others.
The ‘snow-globe’ is a great image to show loss of control of language that has previously been used well and confidently. This leads to the question posed later in the collection in “The Woman in the Mirror” written in the form of a pantoum which begins
Who is the woman in the mirror?
Is she the same woman as yesterday?
The repeated lines and questions emphasise the obsessive attempt to make sense of things without success.
Her eyes are as cold as the North Sea.
Who is the woman in the mirror?
Can she see right through me?
Why does she always appear?
The last poem in the collection is the more upbeat title poem “The Yellow Kite” in which Feaver writes how ‘it brightens all/the dark days of my life.’ She continues
My ten-year-old son
made it secretly
for my birthday
the year his father left.
Her son put on ‘appliqued VICKI/in bold red capitals’ illustrated on the front cover. The poem ends with a similar feeling to that found in the last stanza of the first poem.
Watching as it soared,
carrying my name into the sky,
swooping in a dance
with the wind like a fiery bird,
My spirit that I thought
would never recover
struggled up from the floor
and flew into the air.
I highly recommend this collection which communicates powerfully, without self-pity, the difficulties of living with Parkinson’s and even jolts the reader into sharing some sense of the experience. It also conveys some of the positives that are still possible when living with the condition.
Jun 15 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Vicki Feaver
Poetry review – THE YELLOW KITE: Jennifer Johnson admires Vicki Feaver’s skilful use of poetry to explore the experience of living with life-changing illness
Quite a few years ago I attended an Arvon course where Vicki Feaver was one of the tutors. I got the strong impression then that this poet was not one for shying away from difficult truths and her four books together with this short collection The Yellow Kite have proved me right. The first half of this pamphlet consists of poems specifically about Parkinson’s Disease while the second half deals with a wider variety of subjects (although some references to Parkinson’s do appear here as well).
The straightforward writing style is so powerful that I find myself at times almost believing that I am myself living with Parkinson’s. This level of writing skill is unsurprising considering that Feaver has previously won both the Heinemann and Cholmondeley awards. I want to spend the remainder of the review examining how I think this power has been achieved by analysing a few of the poems in the collection.
The Yellow Kite begins with an epigraph which consists of a few lines from Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking”.
These lines, familiar to many readers of poetry, set up the subject of Parkinson’s well. The subsequent poems express the relationship between a sufferer and her disease, a theme that is explored from different angles. Some of the viewpoints may surprise such as the first poem “Ode to Parkinson’s”, a poem praising the disease. This poem shows gradual acceptance of Parkinson’s by imagining it as a constant companion. The relationship changes from that of enemy to friend. The poem begins
The use of mainly one and two syllable words suits the stripped-back basic experience and the alliteration linking ‘slowing’ and ‘steps’ in the second line, ‘shaking’ in the third and ‘scaring’ in the fourth line give emphasis to the constant unwanted results of Parkinson’s. In the second stanza there comes the realisation that both patient and Parkinson’s ‘were locked together/in a wobbly dance.’ There is a change from an initial response in which the body ‘juddered’ when ‘frantic’ towards an accommodation toward a working together.
The multi-syllabic adjectives ‘exaggerated’ and ‘deliberate’ emphasize the level of conscious effort needed for every movement. In the fifth stanza the effect on the sufferer’s mind is also described and accepted.
In the final stanza some unexpected joy is achieved with the following realisation.
There are several poems about ‘Shaking Woman’: “The Shaking Woman and the Kingfisher”; “The Shaking Woman in the Snow”; and “The Shaking Woman takes a Bath”. The last of these describes trying to get out of a bath but ‘with wrists too weak / to hold her grip, she falls back.’ She then has ‘a vision of her mother / lying helpless at the end,’.
For me the most devastating poem is “Her Lost Words”. The ability to know and use words well is surely a central part of many people’s identity and to feel it slipping away must be terrifying.
The ‘snow-globe’ is a great image to show loss of control of language that has previously been used well and confidently. This leads to the question posed later in the collection in “The Woman in the Mirror” written in the form of a pantoum which begins
The repeated lines and questions emphasise the obsessive attempt to make sense of things without success.
The last poem in the collection is the more upbeat title poem “The Yellow Kite” in which Feaver writes how ‘it brightens all/the dark days of my life.’ She continues
Her son put on ‘appliqued VICKI/in bold red capitals’ illustrated on the front cover. The poem ends with a similar feeling to that found in the last stanza of the first poem.
I highly recommend this collection which communicates powerfully, without self-pity, the difficulties of living with Parkinson’s and even jolts the reader into sharing some sense of the experience. It also conveys some of the positives that are still possible when living with the condition.