(Fleur Adcock is one of Britain's most accomplished poets....)
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". It does not cover her later collection "Dragon Talk" (2010).
(Fleur Adcock's title refers to the transparent, glitterin...)
Fleur Adcock's title refers to the transparent, glittering wings of some of the species-bees, mosquitoes, dragonflies-celebrated or lamented in a sequence of poems on encounters with arthropods, from the stick insects and crayfish of her native New Zealand to the clothes' moths that infest her London house. There is an elegy for the once abundant caterpillars of her English childhood, while other sections of the book include elegies for human beings and poems based on family wills from the 16th to the 20th centuries, as well as birthday greetings for old friends and for a new great-grandson. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
(After the appearance of Fleur Adcock's Poems 1960-2000 sh...)
After the appearance of Fleur Adcock's Poems 1960-2000 she wrote no more poems for several years. This cessation coincided with -but was not entirely caused by -her giving up smoking. When poetry returned to her in 2003 it tended towards a sparer, more concentrated style. This new collection continues to reflect her preoccupations with family matters and with her ambivalent feelings about her native New Zealand. Her initial inspiration was the letters her father wrote home from England to his parents during World War II, which evoked her own memories of that era. The central sequence moves from her first coming to consciousness in New Zealand up to and through the war years in Britain and on to sketches from her teens in puritanical postwar Wellington after her reluctant return -not without her usual sardonic eye for incongruities and absurdities. There are also affectionate poems for her grandchildren and her late mother.
(Hoard brings together poems Fleur Adcock had to keep unde...)
Hoard brings together poems Fleur Adcock had to keep under wraps for several years because they didn’t suit the themes of her last two collections, The Land Ballot and Glass Wings. They include reflections on the tools of her trade (handwriting, typewriters), snatches of autobiography (a brief, ill-considered second marriage followed by her migration from New Zealand to England in 1963), and poems on trees, wildlife and everyday objects. Ellen Wilkinson, who led the Jarrow March in 1936, makes two appearances, joining Coleridge, several ancestors and two dogs. The most recent poems in the book recall Adcock's visits around the North Island of New Zealand in 2015, affirming her renewed although not uncritical affection for the country of her birth.
(A land ballot was the means by which Fleur Adcock's grand...)
A land ballot was the means by which Fleur Adcock's grandparents, immigrants from Manchester during World War I, were able to bid for a piece of native bush on the slopes of Mount Pirongia in the North Island of New Zealand. Their task was to turn this unpromising acreage into a dairy farm. This sequence of poems follows the course of their efforts and builds up a portrait of a small, isolated community.
Fleur Adcock is a New Zealand poet and editor who has been one of the most influential poets in Britain for the past 30 years.
Background
Fleur Adcock was born Kareen Fleur Adcock on February 10, 1934, in Auckland, New Zealand, to Cyril John Adcock and his wife, Irene Robinson Adcock, a writer. Fleur has a sister, Marilyn Duckworth, who is also a writer. In 1939, her family moved to England where she spent the most of her childhood. After the end of World War II, her family returned to New Zealand in 1947.
Education
Fleur studied Classics from Victoria University at Wellington. She obtained her graduate degree and went on to complete her post-graduation in 1956.
Fleur started her career as an assistant lecturer in classics at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand and also served as the assistant librarian until 1961. The following year, she returned to Wellington to work in the Alexander Turnbull Library. In 1963, she moved to England and took up a post as an assistant librarian at the ‘Foreign and Commonwealth Office’ in London. She also took two creative writing fellowships in UK; the first at ‘Charlotte Mason College of Education’ in Windermere and the other one at the universities of ‘Newcastle upon Tynne’ and ‘Durham’.
In 1964, her first poetry collection titled ‘Eye of the Hurricane’ was published in New Zealand, and since then she has written many collections of poetry, observing the world with a quiet incisiveness. In subsequent years, she published several poetry collections such as ‘Tigers’ (1967), ‘High Tide in the Garden’ (1971). Her 1974 collection, ‘The Scenic Route’, is based on her relationship with her Irish ancestors.
Her 1979 poetry collection titled ‘The Inner Harbour’ is generally cited as her most artistically successful work. The book is divided into four sections and confronts the issues of love, death, and loss. In the final section, her poem reflects an acceptance and coming to terms with the losses that she experienced so far in her life.
Since 1979, she has worked as a freelance writer, producing her own poetry and translating and editing collections. In 1986, she published two more poetry collections, ‘The Incident Book’ and ‘Hotspur: a ballad’. In addition to writing, she became a commentator on poetry for the ‘British Broadcasting Corporation’. She has also served as a translator of medieval-Latin and twentieth-century Romanian poetry.
Quotations:
"You have to listen to your own voice. Not your heart, not your instincts, not any of that self-permissive psycho-babble stuff. No, none of that. If it was just about instincts and bright ideas it wouldn't need to be a voice. It's about words. You hear them, read them, then you write. But mostly read. Read the bloody poems."
"Poetry is a search for ways of communication; it must be conducted with openness, flexibility, and a constant readiness to listen."
"I write in praise of the solitary act: of not feeling a trespassing tongue forced into one's mouth, one's breath smothered, nipples crushed against the ribcage, and that metallic tingling in the chin set off by a certain odd nerve: unpleasure."
Connections
In 1952, Fleur married Alistair Campbell, also a poet, whom she met in Victoria. She gave birth to two sons, Gregory and Andrew. The couple divorced in 1958.
In 1962, she married Barry Crump, a writer, but the marriage lasted for only a year as they got divorced in 1963. Subsequently she moved from New Zealand to England with her five-year old son Andrew, leaving Gregory with his father.