Dragon Talk

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. Dragon Talk, published in 2010, reflected her continuing preoccupations with family matters and 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.

Fleur Adcock (1934-2024) was 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 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 also wrote movingly of birth, death and bereavement, and has tackled political issues with honest indignation and caustic wit.

Her first Bloodaxe retrospective, Poems 1960-2000, was followed by five further collections, all of which remain available as separate editions. They are also included in full in her Collected Poems. This first complete edition of her poetry was published on her 90th birthday in February 2024, superseding her earlier retrospective, with the addition of Dragon Talk (2010), Glass Wings (2013), The Land Ballot (2015), Hoard (2017) and The Mermaid''s Purse (2021), along with a gathering of 20 new poems.