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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1852245301
• ISBN13: 9781852245306
• Release Date: April 2000
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Length: 287 Pages
• Weight: 1.24 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Deserves More Recognition in the US

If you like Elizabeth Bishop, Raymond Carver, Wendy Cope, or Gerald Stern, you'll appreciate Fleur Adcock's work. She's a native New Zealander now living in England. Her poems are conversational in tone, completely unsentimental, and often funny, with surprising twists and turns. They're also well-constructed with skillful use of meter and rhyme. I'm particularly enjoying her series based on research into the lives of her ancestors. These poems, built upon snippets of history, talk movingly and humorously about our relationship to our forebears. Listen to the first 2 lines of "Nellie:" "Just because it was so long ago" "doesn't mean it ceases to be sad." You're drawn right in.