Book description
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. This first
Collected edition of her poetry replaces her "Selected
Poems", with the addition of work from her later Oxford
collections "The Incident Book", "Time-Zones" and
"Looking Back". It does not cover her later collection
"Dragon
Talk" (2010).
