Fleur Adcock

The Mermaid’s Purse


                           when you pick it up,
is full of squirmy sea-larvae –
she doesn’t carry actual money,
but then she’s not an actual mermaid
(actuality not being
a possible attribute of mermaids).

Three times I crossed the equator –
by water, that is; flying doesn’t count.
The coloured surface is camouflage;
underneath is black; black and heaving.
Rats nest in the diver’s helmet.
Why, then they must be sea-rats.

So where do we go from here? Down, down,
where the eels go. Don’t wait for me –
I’ll be along later. Down, down –
think of me supping at mermaid’s milk
as you shrink into your philosophy.
The mermaid’s child will be a dogfish.


*


Victoria Road


I’m saying to Meg and Alex
‘I came past your street this afternoon.
I wanted to visit you but you’re dead.’
And Meg is saying, in her sensible way,
‘Can’t be helped. Next time check up first’,

while Alex gives a sort of rueful smile
mouthing ‘Sorry!’ as if through a window
(I can’t hear him), and flinging his hands out
in apology, as when they met me
at Kathmandu airport in a thunderstorm:
‘Sorry about the rain!’

Sorry about the deaths. But let’s not start.

Anyway, now that we’ve established that
we can get on with the conversation.
I’ll show them the pictures I took
of Meg beside the two saplings
on a riverside walk in Stony Stratford
where we planted Alex’s ashes;
we used to visit the swans around there.

Alex will embark on a story
about spotting his hero Graham Greene
in the south of France, and trying
to pluck up courage…
I think I may have heard it before,
but I was never sure of the ending.


*

Island Bay


Bright specks of neverlastingness
float at me out of the blue air,
perhaps constructed by my retina

which these days constructs so much else,
or by the air itself, the limpid sky,
the sea drenched in its turquoise liquors

like the paua shells we used to pick up
seventy years ago, two bays
along from here, under the whale’s great jaw.

*

Election 1945


The first election I can remember
is the one in which my father and mother
voted Winston Churchill out of office,
and we got the National Health Service –

which gave me an exaggerated view
of what democracy can actually do.


*


Mayonnaise


‘Could I prevail upon you’, said Lorna,
‘to make me some more of that mayonnaise?’ –
with garlic, for dipping crudités in:
a small thank-you-for-having-me gesture
after my stay in her Newcastle house.

She had another guest on my last night.
He sat with us next morning at breakfast,
drinking his coffee as I stirred and whisked
and added this or that and whisked some more,
while Lorna made notes. He said there should be

a genre painting recording the scene
(this being in the days before Facebook)
in case the three of us became famous,
called ‘Roy Fisher watching Lorna Tracy
watching Fleur Adcock making mayonnaise.’

Quite soon he dropped me off at the station,
and drove to Durham for his assignment.
‘A most entertaining man, Roy’, I wrote
in my journal on the train going home,
‘with a nice line in pedantic phrases.’

He was fifty-two, which I then supposed
to be quite old, but as it came about
we had something like thirty-five years more,
on and off, to entertain each other
one way or the next, as our lives allowed.

 

    11     The Mermaid’s Purse
    12     Island Bay
    13     The Teacher’s Wife
    18     The Islands
    19     A Bunch of Names
    21     The Fur Line
    22     A Feline Forage in Auckland
    23     House
    24     Peter’s Hat
    25     A Small Correction
    26     In the Cupboard
    27     Giza
    28     Siena
    29     Realms
    30     In the Cloud
    31     Hollyhocks
    32     Berries
    33     Amazing Grace
    35     Käthi Bowden in Bavaria
    36     Divining
    38     Welsh
    39     This Fountain
    40     Magnolia Seed Pods
    41     Bats
    44     Novice Flyer
    45     Wood Mice
    46     Sparrowhawk
    47     Election 1945
    48     The Little Theatre Club
    49     The Other Christmas Poem
    51     Anadyomene
    52     Victoria Road
    53     To Stephenie at 11pm
    54     Lightning Conductor
    55     The Annual Party
    57     Letting Them Know
    58     Blackberries
    59     Tatters
    60     The Old Road

POEMS FOR ROY
i.m. Roy Fisher, 1930-2017
    63     Dead Poets’ Society
    64     Jade Plant
    65     Double Haiku
    66     Elm
    67     Four Poems and a Funeral
    68     Maundy Thursday 2017
    69     An April Bat
    70     Porridge
    71     Annual Tribute
    73     Winter Solstice
    74     Snowman
    75     Mayonnaise

    77     Notes

‘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 [on Glass Wings]

‘Fleur Adcock’s poetry is lauded for its composure and ease of delivery.  Yet that sense of control…belies a more complicated history.’ – Julian Stannard, Times Literary Supplement

‘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 (Best Poetry of 2013) [on Glass Wings]

‘Adcock’s reputation has been founded on her spare, conversational poems, in which the style is deceptively simple, apparently translucent…those who see in such poems only flatness are missing the power of a voice which teases both reader and subject.’ – Jo Shapcott, Times Literary Supplement