Selected Poems

by Fleur Adcock

Fleur Adcock's poetry has been widely admired for its combination of verbal precision and technical control with a wide range of subject matter and tone. This volume includes a selection of early work from her first two collections. together with a substantial representation from her three
most recent collections, High Tide in the Garden, The Scenic Route, and The Inner Harbour, all now unavailable. In addition, this volume includes 26 new poems.
"Her poems seem to rest on the page with a special lenient grace."--Peter Porter, Observer. "The most talented woman poet now writing in Britain."--Gavin Ewart

Genres: Poetry

144 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 1983

About the author

Fleur Adcock was a New Zealand poet and editor. Of English and Northern Irish ancestry, Adcock lived much of her life in England. She is well-represented in New Zealand poetry anthologies, was awarded an honorary doctorate of literature from Victoria University of Wellington, and was awarded an OBE in 1996 for her contribution to New Zealand literature. In 2008 she was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to literature.

Reviews

[Tracy Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adcock is an easy poet to read. She is also prolific, seeing the potential for a poem in every life encounter. And clearly she knows her trade. Adcock has a flair for form, whether it's sonnets or syllabics, blank verse or rhymed ballads, villanelles or her own metrical structures, her words trip off the tongue in all their natural cadences. She makes it look so easy. Yet Adcock is a poet of everyday occurrences, whether it's the homeless outside the train station, or the way her child pronounces 'birds' (briddes). And why should pentametre be reserved for the lofty and almost out of reach? Adcock's talent consists in bringing such matters close to earth. Of course, picking out favourites is always a matter of taste but, for me, the sequence, The Thing Itself, had particularly strong impact. These are poems that draw on Adcock's own experience with cervical cancer, a lens through which to view the subject of sickness and mortality. The Soho Hospital for Women is memorable for its portrayal of different women in the cancer ward: 'Nellie has only one breast / ample enough to make several.' People poems are something that Adcock does well. Mr Morrison and Miss Hamilton in London both present poetic narratives that home in those transformative moments in a person's life: 'She lay pierced by thirty black spears' and '... it was not just pain after all; / it enrolled him among the sufferers, alloted him / a stake in the world's ill.' I hesitate to use the phrase 'women's poetry' with its implication of marginal voices, but then that is perhaps to deny a bitter truth. In any case, Adcock's poems on female gender perspective tend to be both incisive and funny: 'Odd how the seemingly maddest of men - / sheer loonies, the classically paranoid, [...] return to their gentle senses in bed.' (Madmen); and the wonderful, The Ex-Queen Among the Astronomers, 'And so when these have laid aside / their telescopes, when lids are closed / between machine and sky, she seeks / terrestrial bodies to bestride.' I was less keen on her travel poems about Africa and Asia, which I felt had a touristy feel. Yet much of Adcock's writing is about belonging and displacement, the feeling of an outsider searching for her roots: 'I am the dotted lines on the map: / footpaths exist only where they are walked on' (Paths); '... once again the routine question / "This place, now: would it be possible / to live here?"' (Three Rainbows in One Morning). Her poems are peppered with natural imagery, an intimate knowledge of flora and fauna. Rather, I would call her a landscape poet: 'The slow pigeon-flight / the loamy scent, offer themselves to me / as little presents' (Script); wherever that landscape may be. A woman who chooses her house for its trees and their 'soft sudden' leaves (Trees).