# I Want! I Want!

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/vicki-feaver/i-want-i-want/9781787331815

![I Want! I Want!](https://quivercdn.com/covers/jonathan-cape/vicki-feaver/i-want-i-want_978-17-8733-181-5-d4554bf8.jpg?v=2026-09-22%2002%3A34%3A03)

- Book: [I Want! I Want!](https://www.bookquiver.com/vicki-feaver/i-want-i-want) ([I Want! I Want!.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/vicki-feaver/i-want-i-want.md))
- Authors: [Vicki Feaver](https://www.bookquiver.com/vicki-feaver)
- Publisher: jonathan_cape
- ISBN: 978-17-8733-181-5
- Pages: 112
- Published: 2019-11-21
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: Softcover

## Description

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.