Fleur Adcock

Winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, 2006

Poetry Book Society Special Commendation

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.

This first Bloodaxe retrospective of her poetry replaced an earlier Selected Poems (1986), 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 published five later collections with Bloodaxe followed by a new Collected Poems published by Bloodaxe on her 90th birthday in 2024, superseding Poems 1960-2000.

'This monumental Collected serves as a historical document – hundreds of snapshots, in the backgrounds of which pass millions of lives – as much as an artistic one, the sixty-year-long record of a piercing, curious mind. Adcock’s poems have the confidential feel of a private journal, all witty asides and wry observations, following her imagination into her ancestors’ past, her youth during the war, old loves and friendships. A book like this is a rare thing indeed, a life lived in poems.' – Dave Coates, Poetry Book Society Spring Bulletin 2024, on Collected Poems

‘Fleur Adcock may be about to turn 90, but – as her new Collected Poems shows – she’s still writing essential work. Originally from New Zealand, since settling in England in 1963 she has become one of the most celebrated, and quietly influential, voices in British poetry. Adcock writes with a rare lightness of touch, and a candour that’s often seen her labelled a confessional poet. “For a Five-Year-Old” is one of her earliest poems, but its careful balancing act of light and dark – warmth on the one hand, faintly shocking, self-critical humour on the other – sets the tone for her later writing.’ – Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph (Poem of the Week)

‘Fleur Adcock’s Collected Poems is a vast treasure chest of vivid, memorable poetry.’ – Edmund Prestwich, London Grip

'Throughout the Collected Poems there is the voice of a poet of real commitment and reach, brilliantly clear-eyed, whatever the personae.' – Patrick Davison Roberts, The High Window

Fleur Adcock reads nine poems

Fleur Adcock reads nine poems from Poems 1960-2000 (Bloodaxe Books, 2000): ‘The Video’, ‘For a Five-Year-Old’, ‘The Pangolin’, ‘An Illustration to Dante’, ‘Things’, Weathering’, ‘For Heidi with Blue Hair’, ‘Where They Lived’ and Counting’.. Pamela Robertson-Pearce filmed Fleur Adcock at her home in London on 29 June 2007. This film is from the DVD-anthology In Person: 30 Poets, filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce & edited by Neil Astley (Bloodaxe Books, 2008).

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