Poems 1960-2000

by Fleur Adcock

Fleur Adcock is one of Britain's most accomplished poets. Her poised, ironic poems are tense and tightly controlled as well as shrewdly laconic, and often chilling as she unmasks the deceptions of love or unravels family lives. Disarmingly conversational in style, they are remarkable for their psychological insight and their unsentimental, mischievously casual view of personal relationships. Born in New Zealand, she has explored questions of identity and rootedness throughout her work, both in relation to her personal allegiances to her native and adopted countries as well as her family history, whose long-dead characters she brings to life. She has also written movingly of birth, death and bereavement, and has tackled political issues with honest indignation and caustic wit. This first Collected edition of her poetry replaces her Selected Poems, with the addition of work from her later Oxford collections The Incident Book, Time-Zones and Looking Back. All her most celebrated poems are here, from the highly entertaining 'Against Coupling', 'Smokers For Celibacy' and 'The Prize-Winning Poem' to modern classics such as 'The Ex-Queen Amongst the Astronomers' and 'Things' - as well as the notorious one about kissing John Prescott... She has since published five later collections with Bloodaxe.

Genres: Poetry

287 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2000

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

[James Askari · Rating 4 out of 5]

Descended from Irish Protestants, Adcock was born in New Zealand. Her poems describe how she studied Classics at school and literature in Wellington, had early love affairs, found the rocky seascape of 'Stewart Island' intolerable and decided to leave the country just at the point when the 'hotel manager's wife' drew her attention to 'all this beauty'. 'Ngauranga Gorge Hill' states she has no quarrel with the city for giving her two sons; 'but I still think it was a barren place'. Adcock has a keen sense for history, more that of family history than that of nations and politics (although in her understated manner, she notes the drooping Tory heads of Wordsworth's daffodils on the day of Mrs Thatcher's election). On a trip back after fourteen years in London, she observes how most of her primary school has made way for a motorway bypass, while the hook on which her father hung a barometer sixty years ago is still in his childhood house.

There is more about children and lovers than parents. With her divorce, Adcock lives apart from at least one of her sons. Andrew, who asks whether he would die ('For Andrew'), paints his childhood furniture 'tangerine'. The stress on a personal experience and perspective is quietly resilient. While sex is rendered, there are more breaking-up poems than love poems; and the tone is dry and hard-headed ('Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow' takes exception to an ex's cliches, and 'Advice to a Discarded Lover' compares his self-pity to 'maggots beneath the skin'). She grants she married 'an anecdotal ape'. A poem of retrospect says that while she admired an ex and fellow poet's flourishes, he admired her 'laconic' style, and one realises this is right. One thought or one impression in the poems usually gets one phrase. Her most quotable lines can be adjectival--'the sea knows better ... Underneath it is fat and fecund'--'Sea-Lives', from 'The Inner Harbour').

Maybe more valuable than any phrase- or image-making is Adcock's confidence to write close to experience (e.g. 'Feverish', about running a temperature), not shunning what may be thought trivial or diaristic, and not excluding through embarrassment the unconscious, nasty, scatological or domestic. The subject of 'Mornings After' is not sex but her dreams, usually pleasant and to be happily revisited in the bath, but occasionally surprising in how 'ludicrously revolting' the images are: 'the vast slit/of a sagging whore ... eating worms or shit'. She also stands back to note 'ludicrous violence in kitchens' fending off what her unprogrammatically feminist mode terms a composite 'Bogyman'. Mid-career poems deal with India, Nepal and travel through an unspecified land of heat, borders, ordinary boredom. Her manner can become freer, as she starts to teach creative writing and is influenced by American writers like Carlos Williams as well as Marianne Moore, although an elegy to her mentor James Baxter is couched as a tonally informal verse epistle. A year in the Lake District makes her want to know more about the handed-down local gossip about Wordsworth than poems dealing with him from self-consciously aspirant fellow poets. She writes love poems at later stages of her life than might be conventional; 'Crab' describes how a new lover snatches the toxic 'Dead Men's Fingers' from her as she is trailing their 'mossy' texture over her tongue. I like the poems with substantial engagements with a long stretch of history (personal or otherwise), with education or the institutions of art or culture and with other people (including her elegies) best.

[Al Capwned · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adcock's poetry is full of lovely images and "stories". Your mind keeps wandering to different places.

[Richard Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's taken me nine years to complete this book. My blog:

https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/...

[Mark Heathcote · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good read.

[Cdan · Rating 4 out of 5]

i'm not a huge consumer of poetry, but reading this made me want more. poetry, that is.