Hello Gentle Reader,
The poetry of Fleur Adcock was a late in life discovery. Poetry is a literary form which is always fighting its corner. Its meager allowances routinely reduced. Yet still it pushes on. Poets like Fleur Adcock, proved that poetry can be pulled from the lofty heights of academia and the ivory tower. While the poems of Blake, Shelley, Keats and Byron are pulled from the shelves, their names inspiring dread and groans from students who must look through their lines and scry out so meaning. It is poets much like Fleur Adcock, who work against these traditions, ensuring poetry retains a somewhat grounded presence, celebrating the observational and the everyday, rather than soaring for the celestial heavens, to reside in starlight immortality, only to descend as some form of torture on high school students, who will never return to ‘that tiresome subject.’ Where does one place Fleur Adcock? Born in New Zealand in 1934, but lived in England from the age of 5 before returning to New Zealand at 13. She then returned to England in 1963, working as a librarian in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Her first collection of poetry was published in New Zealand “The Eye of the Hurricane,” in 1964, while her sophomore poetry collection “Tigers,” was published in the United Kingdom in 1967. In short, Fleur Adcock straddled both worlds. Her poem “Immigrant,” recounts the sense of being an outsider upon returning to England, whereby Adcock commented on being too colonial with her New Zealand accent, which she was desperate to lose, and while walking through St. James Park, Adcock spies the pelicans amongst the swans, which she likens to herself in her colonial manner, despite to shift, change, and blend. Through poems that move through the everyday, ruminating on objects, thoughts on a place and one’s relationship to it, and human relationships. Adcock’s poetry is written in the beautiful and approachable language, a language of shared ground but with an eye trained for brilliance and mystery lurking in the everyday, which is the anecdote poetry provides to the world. As testament to Fleur Adcock’s poetry, she received the (then) Queens Gold Medal for Poetry in 2006 for her collected poems “Poems 1960 – 2000,” and went on to write another five poetry collections, and two more collected poetry collections, the most recent published in 2024. Literary talent runs in the family of course as well, Adcock’s sister Marilyn Duckworth is a novelist, and her mother Irene also published.
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
M. Mary
No comments:
Post a Comment