By the time I came to writing my second book, The Handless Maiden, I'd got a lot braver. And one of the poems in it is a poem about marigolds. There's a whole tradition of writing poems comparing women to flowers, mostly by male poets. It's a sort of flattery - women are beautiful like flowers - but they are also silent and passive and they fade, of course, quite quickly. So they're often seduction poems - a famous one is Herrick's 'Gather ye roses while ye may'. I wanted to write a poem about flowers that subverted that tradition and took the power for women. There's a quite scary end to this poem - and I've never actually torn the head off a ...

By the time I came to writing my second book, The Handless Maiden, I'd got a lot braver. And one of the poems in it is a poem about marigolds. There's a whole tradition of writing poems comparing women to flowers, mostly by male poets. It's a sort of flattery - women are beautiful like flowers - but they are also silent and passive and they fade, of course, quite quickly. So they're often seduction poems - a famous one is Herrick's 'Gather ye roses while ye may'. I wanted to write a poem about flowers that subverted that tradition and took the power for women. There's a quite scary end to this poem - and I've never actually torn the head off a man, I mean not even, I hope, metaphorically, and I don't know any women who have. I was thinking of the women in the Bacchae legend.

Read more

Marigolds

 

Not the flowers men give women –
delicately scented freesias,
stiff red roses, carnations
the shades of bridesmaids’ dresses,
almost sapless flowers,
drying and fading – but flowers
that wilt as soon as their stems
are cut, leaves blackening
as if blighted by the enzymes
in our breath, rotting to a slime
we have to scour from the rims
of vases; flowers that burst
from tight, explosive buds, rayed
like the sun, that lit the path
up the Thracian mountain, that we wound
into our hair, stamped on
in ecstatic dance, that remind us
we are killers, can tear the heads
off men’s shoulders;
flowers we still bring
secretly and shamefully
into the house, stroking
our arms and breasts and legs
with their hot orange fringes,
the smell of arousal.

from The Handless Maiden (Jonathan Cape, 1994), copyright © Vicki Feaver 1994, used by permission of the author and The Random House Group Ltd.

The free tracks you can enjoy in the Poetry Archive are a selection of a poet’s work. Our catalogue store includes many more recordings which you can download to your device.

Close