Fleur Adcock – författare

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.

"In a compelling mix of fact, conjecture and imagination, she recreates one of the most fascinating and strange periods of our colonial history: small isolated communities establishing determined pockets of Europeanness in an alien environment" - Sarah Quigley, New Zealand Listener

"Informality and immediacy are vivid ways to remake a world; and Adcock''s style has not dated in the half-century since her debut" - Fiona Sampson, Guardian

"Fleur Adcock is as clear-eyed as always in a collection that ranges widely over lost worlds, family histories...but always maintains the art of seemingly artless observation" - Adam Newey, Guardian

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. Poetry Book Society Special Commendation

Fleur Adcock began writing the poems in this book when she was 82. The two chief settings are New Zealand, with its multi-coloured seas, and Britain, seen in various decades. There are foreign travels, flirtations, family memories, deaths and conversations with the dead. Katherine Mansfield, incognito, dodges an academic conference; there’s a lesson in water divining as well as a rather unusual Christmas party. We meet several varieties of small mammal, numerous birds, doomed or otherwise, and some sheep. The book ends with a sequence in memory of her friend, the poet Roy Fisher.

Fleur Adcock (1934-2024) was one of Britain''s most accomplished poets, unmasking the deceptions of love and unravelling family lives through her poised, ironic poems.

This first complete edition of her poetry was published on her 90th birthday, and updates her earlier retrospective, Poems 1960-2000, with five later collections published by Bloodaxe, along with 20 new poems. 

Born in New Zealand, Fleur Adcock 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 tackled political issues with honest indignation and caustic wit.

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 Among the Astronomers'' and ''Things''.