Fleur Adcock was born in New Zealand in 1934, and spent the war years in England, returning with her family to New Zealand in 1947. She emigrated to Britain in 1963. She received an OBE in 1996, and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2006 for Poems 1960-2000 (2000). Her Collected Poems (2024) supersedes that retrospective with the addition of five later collections, including Glass Wings (2013), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and Hoard (2017), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, along with new, previously uncollected poems. In 2019 Fleur Adcock was presented with the New Zealand Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry by the Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern. She has lived in East Finchley, north London, since 1963.
Adcock has a deceptively laid-back tone, through which the sharper
edge of her talent is encountered like a razor blade in a
peach.
*The Guardian*
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.
*TLS*
Informality and immediacy are good ways to remake a world; and
Adcock’s style has not dated in the half-century since her
debut.
*The Guardian*
Most of Fleur Adcock’s best poems have something to do with bed:
she writes well about sex, very well about illness, and very well
indeed about dreaming… Her imagination thrives on what threatens
her peace of mind, and only when she is unguarded can these threats
have their full creative effect. Hence the importance of bed: it is
the place where the elegant artful barriers that she builds from
day to day are most easily over-thrown… Throughout her writing
life, she has made a fine art from holding on to principles of
orderliness and good clear sense; but she has made an even finer
one from loosening her grip on them.
*TLS*
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