Dual control

Clare Best reviews 'The Yellow Kite' by Vicki Feaver (Mariscat Press, 2025)

The Red Rock

Rock I found on a beach,
the colour of terracotta.

Riddled with holes, it’s like a sculpture
of a damaged brain.

I hold it, heavy and knobbly
in my hand, poking my fingers

into holes like little caves,
peering into narrower holes

running through it like the shafts
and tunnels of a mine.

I keep it as a memo
of my mind’s workings:

all the blind ends it arrives at
and occasional triumphs —

after days of drilling in the dark,
breaking through into brilliant light.

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‘The Red Rock’ is from The Yellow Kite by Vicki Feaver (Mariscat Press, 2025) — big thanks to Mariscat for letting us reproduce it here.

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Susan Sontag wrote, in 1978: “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”

Poetry concerning illness and disease, reflecting on body and mind under health-related conditions of distress and limitation, can sometimes feel exclusive. The writer might (understandably) experience themselves to be so thoroughly a citizen of the kingdom of the sick that they all but lose sight of the kingdom of the well, let alone the rickety bridges joining the two realms. Vicki Feaver, in her 2025 Mariscat Press pamphlet The Yellow Kite, maintains dual citizenship of the two kingdoms, articulating the truth of Parkinson’s Disease in poems of clarity, courage and good humour, rejoicing in life whilst never underestimating what has already been lost, and what will be lost as the disease progresses.

In these twenty-five poems, Feaver invites readers to join her on a walk along the tightrope of living. This collection is not ‘about’ Parkinson’s, but it does use the disease as a powerful lens through which to look closely at both kingdoms.

How does Feaver approach this work? I want to focus here on a few features of the poems that strike me as being keys to the complexity and balance that make this collection so relatable and memorable.

The first is point of view. In the three ‘Shaking Woman’ poems, Parkinson’s is imagined almost as some kind of invisible puppeteer or ghostly observer, while the speaker as ‘she’ becomes a victim of cruel pranks. For instance in ‘The Shaking Woman and the Kingfisher’: “her future’s as uncertain / as the fate of a silver birch / torn from the bank by the force / of the river in spate.” But the speaker’s lack of agency does not last. At the end of this poem there is a “brave / curious child, still alive / in her chest, beating / tight fists against her ribs.”

The use of third person can be read as a way of the speaker distancing herself from her own disease. It is interesting that in an earlier version of the opening poem ‘Ode to Parkinson’s’ on the Scottish Poetry Library website, the first person ‘I’ is used, whereas the poem in the pamphlet has moved to the third person. Does this imply that the poet has wanted to communicate this distancing more deliberately over time? At any rate, the third person is sustained until well after half-way through the pamphlet, so that the shift from ‘she’ to ‘I’ – when it comes – appears to denote a change over time in the way the speaker relates to the disease.

Suddenly, ‘Magpies’ breaks into the first person ‘I’ in a poem that recalls early memories and delivers a neat Blakean image of magpies:

[…] — strutting
cockily down garden paths,
whizzing through the trees
like smartly dressed waiters —
reminding me that joy and sorrow
flit equally through the world.

The change here brings the sense of a state of illness being accommodated, tolerated in a new way, as though the speaker is accepting a fresh self, no longer othering the diseased version of herself.

After this, Feaver uses the first person several more times, including in ‘The Red Rock’ – an astonishingly effective poem of clear-eyed exploration, in which a holed rock is perceived as “a sculpture / of a damaged brain”. This is a beautiful confluence of two ideas, two realities, seeming to allow a deep understanding, “after days of drilling in the dark, / breaking through into brilliant light.” These first-person poems might have revealed a more personal, more immersive relationship with the disease, but the ‘I’ appears strong, in control.

So, these two perspectives on the lived experience of the disease (‘she’ and ‘I’) enact another duality: the speaker lives in both ways with Parkinsons – at arm’s length, but also side by side. Readers have to stay on their toes, alert to both versions of the story, and sensitive to the changing use of pronouns.

An extraordinary poem, ‘Parkinson’s Speaks,’ appears across the central spread of the pamphlet, bringing the shocking arrival of the disease as a fully-fledged persona. This poem embodies the essence of the feat that Feaver has achieved in this collection – that of being able to look at the disease from multiple angles and write with a voice that is ‘loud and clear’ in every instance.

As well as using altering viewpoints effectively, Feaver brings technical range to meet the challenge of the subject matter. Her development of imagery is firmly controlled and surprising. In ‘The Shaking Woman in the Snow’ she sets up snow as being associated with life, starting with thoughts of “driving / in a blizzard with her baby” and “a quilt where a child // can lie, waving her arms”, and then turns the snow into a “bed for a drunk / or someone who’s reached / the tolerable end / of pain and distress.” All in thirty short lines. Ice and snow turn up in several other poems, and of course each time the metaphor echoes, deepens and evolves.

Some of the most affecting poems, for me, are those in which the speaker is shown consciously observing herself. ‘The Shaking Woman Takes a Bath’ is joyful, painful and honest, bringing a welcome new lexicon to banish the clichéd vocabulary of ‘battling’ and ‘fighting’ disease. Feaver’s relationship with Parkinson’s speaks a language of music and scent, hot and cold, fantasies of exotic places, until finally:

she manoeuvres herself
onto her knees, struggles
to her feet and climbs out,
trembling and triumphant
on the bath mat.

Other poems, such as ‘The Woman in the Mirror’ and ‘Boxing is Good for Parkinson’s’ use repetition in ways that reflect the perseveration often experienced by people with this condition. It’s a great way of putting two fingers up at the disease while representing it in the writing itself.

Towards the end of the pamphlet, we see the speaker drawing closer to rocks, berries, birds and flowers. In ‘Campanula’, subject and speaker rhyme in their trembling. In this piece, the “blue of a mind / held perfectly still” is placed just before the final (and title) poem, ‘The Yellow Kite’, in which the speaker looks back and somehow forward too. Time collapses. It’s a gorgeous resolution.

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Clare Best has published a memoir, The Missing List, three full collections of poetry, and several pamphlets and collaborative works. Her latest publications are End of Season / Fine di stagione (Frogmore Press, 2022) and Beyond the Gate (Worple Press, 2023). Clare often collaborates with visual artists and musicians. In 2020-21 she was a Fellow at Guildhall School of Music & Drama. Currently she is writing in response to a family archive. Clare Best’s website is here.

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