by Fleur Adcock
FLEUR ADCOCK
POEMS 1960-2000
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)
‘Adcock has a deceptively laid-back tone, through which the sharper edge of her talent is encountered like a razor blade in a peach’ – CAROL ANN DUFFY, Guardian
‘Adcock’s reputation has been founded on her spare, conversational poems, in which the style is deceptively simple, apparently translucent…a voice which teases both reader and subject’ – JO SHAPCOTT, TLS
‘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…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’ – ANDREW MOTION, TLS
COVER PAINTING:
Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/8-1543) : A Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling
© NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON
Fleur Adcock
POEMS
1960-2000
CONTENTS
Title Page
Acknowledgements
EARLY POEMS FROM
The Eye of the Hurricane (1964) AND Tigers (1967)
Note on Propertius
Flight, with Mountains
Beauty Abroad
Knife-play
Instructions to Vampires
Incident
Unexpected Visit
For Andrew
For a Five-Year-Old
Comment
Miss Hamilton in London
The Man Who X-Rayed an Orange
Composition for Words and Paint
Regression
I Ride on My High Bicycle
Parting Is Such Sweet Sorrow
Hauntings
Advice to a Discarded Lover
The Water Below
Think Before You Shoot
The Pangolin
High Tide in the Garden (1971)
A Game
Bogyman
Clarendon Whatmough
A Surprise in the Peninsula
Purple Shining Lilies
Afterwards
Happy Ending
Being Blind
Grandma
Ngauranga Gorge Hill
Stewart Island
On a Son Returned to New Zealand
Saturday
Trees
Country Station
The Three-toed Sloth
Against Coupling
Mornings After
Gas
The Scenic Route (1974)
The Bullaun
Please Identify Yourself
Richey
The Voyage Out
Train from the Hook of Holland
Nelia
Moa Point
Briddes
The Famous Traitor
Script
In Memoriam: James K. Baxter
St John’s School
Pupation
The Drought Breaks
Kilpeck
Feverish
Folie à Deux
Acris Hiems
December Morning
Showcase
Over the Edge
The Net
An Illustration to Dante
Tokens
Naxal
Bodnath
External Service
Flying Back
Near Creeslough
Kilmacrenan
Glenshane
The Inner Harbour (1979)
Beginnings
Future Work
Our Trip to the Federation
Mr Morrison
Things
A Way Out
Prelude
Accidental
A Message
Proposal for a Survey
Fairy-tale
At the Creative Writing Course
Endings
The Ex-Queen Among the Astronomers
Off the Track
Beaux Yeux
Send-off
In Focus
Letter from Highgate Wood
Poem Ended by a Death
Having No Mind for the Same Poem
Syringa
The Thing Itself
Dry Spell
Visited
The Soho Hospital for Women
Variations on a Theme of Horace
A Walk in the Snow
A Day in October
House-talk
Foreigner
In the Dingle Peninsula
In the Terai
River
To and Fro
The Inner Harbour
Immigrant
Settlers
Going Back
Instead of an Interview
Londoner
To Marilyn from London
Below Loughrigg (1979)
Below Loughrigg
Three Rainbows in One Morning
Binoculars
Paths
Mid-point
The Spirit of the Place
The Vale of Grasmere
Letter to Alistair Campbell
Declensions
Weathering
Going Out from Ambleside
Selected Poems (1983)
In the Unicorn, Ambleside
Downstream
The Hillside
This Ungentle Music
The Ring
Corrosion
4 May 1979
Madmen
Shakespeare’s Hotspur
Nature Table
Revision
Influenza
Crab
Eclipse
On the Border
The Prize-winning Poem
An Emblem
Piano Concerto in E Flat Major
Villa Isola Bella
Lantern Slides
Dreaming
Street Song
Across the Moor
Bethan and Bethany
Blue Glass
Mary Magdalene and the Birds
Hotspur (1986)
Hotspur
Notes
The Incident Book (1986)
Uniunea Scriitorilor
Leaving the Tate
The Bedroom Window
The Chiffonier
Tadpoles
For Heidi with Blue Hair
The Keepsake
England’s Glory
The Genius of Surrey
Loving Hitler
Schools
Halfway Street, Sidcup
St Gertrude’s, Sidcup
Scalford School
Salfords, Surrey
Outwood
On the School Bus
Earlswood
Scalford Again
Neston
Chippenham
Tunbridge Wells
The High Tree
Telling Tales
Drowning
‘Personal Poem’
An Epitaph
Being Taken from the Place
Accidents
On the Land
Icon
Drawings
The Telephone Call
Incidentals
Excavations
Pastoral
Kissing
Double-take
Choices
Thatcherland
Street Scene, London N2
Gentlemen’s Hairdressers
Post Office
Demonstration
Witnesses
Last Song
Time-Zones (1991)
Counting
Libya
What May Happen
My Father
Cattle in Mist
Toads
Under the Lawn
Wren Song
Next Door
Heliopsis Scabra
House-martins
Wildlife
Turnip-heads
The Batterer
Roles
Happiness
Coupling
The Greenhouse Effect
The Last Moa
Creosote
Central Time
The Breakfast Program
From the Demolition Zone
On the Way to the Castle
Romania
Causes
The Farm
Aluminium
A Hymn to Friendship
Smokers for Celibacy
Mrs Fraser’s Frenzy
Meeting the Comet
Looking Back (1997)
I
Where They Lived
Framed
The Russian War
227 Peel Green Road
Nellie
Mary Derry
Moses Lambert: the Facts
Samuel Joynson
Amelia
Barber
Flames
Water
A Haunting
The Wars
Sub Sepibus
Anne Welby
Beanfield
Ancestor to Devotee
Frances
At Great Hampden
At Baddesley Clinton
Traitors
Swings and Roundabouts
Peter Wentworth in Heaven
Notes
II
Tongue Sandwiches
The Pilgrim Fathers
Paremata
Camping
Bed and Breakfast
Rats
Stockings
A Political Kiss
An Apology
Festschrift
Offerings
Danger: Swimming and Boating Prohibited
Risks
Blue Footprints in the Snow
Summer in Bucharest
Moneymore
The Voices
Willow Creek
Giggling
Trio
The Video
New Poems (2000)
Easter
High Society
For Meg
A Visiting Angel
It’s Done This
Kensington Gardens
INDEX OF TITLES AND FIRST LINES
By the Same Author
About the Author
Copyright
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book includes all the poems from Fleur Adcock’s Selected Poems (Oxford University Press, 1983), which drew upon her earlier OUP collections, Tigers (1967), High Tide in the Garden (1971), The Scenic Route (1974) and The Inner Harbour (1979), and Below Loughrigg (Bloodaxe Books, 1979), as well as all the poems from her three later OUP collections, The Incident Book (1986), Time-Zones (1991) and Looking Back (1997). It also includes the text of Hotspur, a ballad for music by Gillian Whitehead, originally published with monoprints by Gretchen Albrecht (Bloodaxe Books, 1986), and Meeting the Comet (Bloodaxe Books, 1988).
Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following publications in which some of the previously uncollected poems in the New Poems section first appeared: Landfall, Last Words (Picador, 1999), Poetry Ireland, Poetry Review and Salt. ‘A Visiting Angel’ was commissioned by Salisbury Festival for the Last Words project in 1999. Fleur Adcock wishes to thank Royal Parks Enterprises and the staff of Kensington Gardens for a Poetry Placement in the summer of 1999.
early poems from
THE EYE OF THE HURRICANE
(1964)
and
TIGERS
(1967)
Note on Propertius
Among the Roman love-poets, possession
is a rare theme. The locked and flower-hung door,
the shivering lover, are allowed. To more
buoyant moods, the canons of expression
gave grudging sanction. Do we, then, assume,
finding Propertius tear-sodden and jealous,
that Cynthia was inexorably callous?
Plenty of moonlight entered that high room
whose doors had met his Alexandrine battles;
and she, so gay a lutanist, was known
to stitch and doze a night away, alone,
until the poet tumbled in with apples
for penitence and for her head his wreath,
brought from a party, of wine-scented roses –
(the garland’s aptness lying, one supposes,
less in the flowers than in the thorns beneath:
her waking could, he knew, provide his verses
with less idyllic themes). Onto her bed
he rolled the round fruit, and adorned her head;
then gently roused her sleeping mouth to curses.
Here the conventions reassert their power:
the apples fall and bruise, the roses wither,
touched by a sallowed moon. But there were other
luminous nights – (even the cactus flower
glows briefly golden, fed by spiny flesh) –
and once, as he acknowledged, all was singing:
the moonlight musical, the darkness clinging
and she compliant to his every wish.
Flight, with Mountains
(in memory of David Herron)
1
Tarmac, take-off: metallic words conduct us
over that substance, black with spilt rain,
to this event. Sealed, we turn and pause.
Engines churn and throb to a climax, then
up: a hard spurt, and the passionate rise
levels out for this gradual incline.
There was something of pleasure in that thrust
from earth into ignorant cloud; but here,
above all tremors of sensation, rest
replaces motion; secretly we enter
the obscurely gliding current, and encased
in vitreous calm inhabit the high air.
Now I see, beneath the plated wing,
cloud edges withdrawing their slow foam
from shoreline, rippling hills, and beyond, the long
crested range of the land’s height. I am
carried too far by this blind rocketing:
faced with mountains, I remember him
whose death seems a convention of such a view:
another one for the mountains. Another one
who, climbing to stain the high snow
with his shadow, fell, and briefly caught between
sudden earth and sun, projected below
a flicker of darkness; as, now, this plane.
2
Only air to hold the wings;
only words to hold the story;
only a frail web of cells
to hold heat in the body.
Breath bleeds from throat and lungs
under the last cold fury;
words wither; meaning fails;
steel wings grow heavy.
3
Headlines announced it, over a double column of type:
the cabled facts, public regret, and a classified list
of your attainments – degrees, scholarships and positions,
and notable feats of climbing. So the record stands:
no place there for my private annotations. The face
that smiles in some doubt from a fuscous half-tone block
stirs me hardly more than those I have mistaken
daily, about the streets, for yours.
I can refer
to my own pictures; and turning first to the easiest,
least painful, I see Dave the raconteur,
playing a shoal of listeners on a casual line
of dry narration. Other images unreel:
your face in a car, silent, watching the dark road,
or animated and sunburnt from your hard pleasures
of snow and rock-face; again, I see you arguing,
practical and determined, as you draw with awkward puffs
at a rare cigarette.
So much, in vivid sequence
memory gives. And then, before I can turn away,
imagination adds the last scene: your eyes bruised,
mouth choked under a murderous weight of snow.
4
‘When you reach the top of a mountain, keep on climbing’ –
meaning, we may suppose,
to sketch on space the cool arabesques of birds
in plastic air, or those
exfoliating arcs, upward and outward,