The Virago Book of Wicked Verse

by Jill Dawson (Editor)

Feisty, bawdy, erotic, and irreverent, The Virago Book of Wicked Verse is a telling commentary on women's ability to transform poetry into a medium of subversiveness. There are jibes at hypocrisy and prejudice, sexiness and sauciness, and a riotous overturning of the "Lady Poet" image. With poets spanning continents and centuries, this anthology abundantly demonstrates the ways in which women can be "wicked," and willfully so. Among the list of contributors are Maya Angelou, Margaret Atwood, Emily Dickinson, Carol Ann Duffy, Suniti Namjoshi, Grace Nichols, Dorothy Parker, Izumi Shikibu, and Stevie Smith.

Genres: Poetry, Feminism

194 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1992

About the author

Jill Dawson was born in Durham and grew up in Staffordshire, Essex and Yorkshire. She read American Studies at the University of Nottingham, then took a series of short-term jobs in London before studying for an MA in Writing at Sheffield Hallam University. In 1997 she was the British Council Writing Fellow at Amherst College, Massachussets.

Her writing life began as a poet, her poems being published in a variety of small press magazines, and in one pamphlet collection, White Fish with Painted Nails (1990). She won an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry in 1992.

She edited several books for Virago, including The Virago Book of Wicked Verse (1992) and The Virago Book of Love Letters (1994). She has also edited a collection of short stories, School Tales: Stories by Young Women (1990), and with co-editor Margo Daly, Wild Ways: New Stories about Women on the Road (1998) and Gas and Air: Tales of Pregnancy and Birth (2002). She is the author of one book of non-fiction for teenagers, How Do I Look? (1991), which deals with the subject of self-esteem.

Jill Dawson is the author of five novels: Trick of the Light (1996); Magpie (1998), for which she won a London Arts Board New Writers Award; Fred and Edie (2000); Wild Boy (2003); and most recently, Watch Me Disappear (2006). Fred and Edie is based on the historic murder trial of Thompson and Bywaters, and was shortlisted for the 2000 Whitbread Novel Award and the 2001 Orange Prize for Fiction.

Her next novel, The Great Lover, is due for publication in early 2009.

Jill Dawson has taught Creative Writing for many years and was recently the Creative Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia. She lives with her family in the Cambridgeshire Fens.

Reviews

[emilia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Usually the best way to read a poetry anthology is probably dipping in and out, or at least reading the poems one at a time and not at the pace of a novel. However this I consumed in not many sittings and that was a great experience.

Lots of very modern and fast-paced poetry in here. A few older iconic feminist poems like some erotic Aphra Behn. I only loved about 30% of these so much that I would go back and read them over and over again. Some mediocre and cringey stuff. However overall somehow this book of wicked verse just works quite nicely, and has an impressive flow as an anthology. I was impressed by the positioning of very different poems next to each other with a thread running through that makes you think about both differently.

This is worth reading but hard to find a copy of.

[Dane Divine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great collection. My favourite has to be Sappho's If you are Squeamish, Carol Ann Duffy's Oppenheim's Cup and Saucer and Anon's Diamond Lily.

I can't set a finished date because it's always sweet to slip into now and then.

[Steven Godin · Rating 3 out of 5]

You beastly child, I wish you had miscarried,
You beastly husband, I wish I had never married.
You hear the north wind riding fast past the window? He calls me.
Do you suppose I shall stay when I can go so easily?

— Lightly Bound, by Stevie Smith.

[Sandra · Rating 1 out of 5]

There were a few entertaining poems in this but I fear the whole of it has something of a scraping the barrel feel about it; certainly it is not a collection of quality, just what could be squeezed in to more or less fit the brief.

[Brian Gowthorpe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jill Dawson is a busy person: editing, academic work, novels, poetry and book reviews. No writer’s block, one assumes. This is women’s take on wickedness and has many funny and irreverent women telling it as they see it. Very enjoyable.

[Jaq · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some awesome, still relevant poems, and some that just didn’t grab my attention.

[Sally · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really nice collection - I liked the criteria for selection; the verse was not wicked in the 'naughty but nice' sense, but examples of women who somehow broke the mould or challenged the prevailing ideals of femininity or womanliness.