Although evidently referring to a white, heterosexual sort of Everyman, MacNeice's famous checklist for the ideal poet ("I would have a poet able-bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions") might equally, with a few adjustments, apply to Fleur Adcock. Her Poems 1960-2000 is a heartening reminder that it is possible to write good poetry about almost anything, provided you are equipped with acute observation, wit and technical flair, gifts which Adcock possesses in abundance.
Her perspectives are as large and versatile as the subjects they illuminate, an outcome perhaps of her twin loyalties to New Zealand, the country of her birth, and England, where she has spent most of her writing life. Her earlier work shows that she shared her countrywoman Katherine Mansfield's ambivalence towards her birthplace; poems like "Moa Point", "Immigrant", and "Going Back" interrogate this predicament, while "Proposal for a Survey" wittily conveys her love for England's landscape and vast literary heritage. In this poem she imagines carrying out an infra-red survey of the countryside to highlight its areas of deepest poetic investment:
the Thames a fiery vein, Cornwall a glow, Tintagel like an incandescent stud, most of East Anglia sparkling like Heathrow; and Shropshire luminous among the best, with Offa's Dyke in diamonds to the West.
In her sensitivity to landscape and awareness of environmental issues (see "The Greenhouse Effect", "The Farm", and "Meeting the Comet") Adcock shares something with New World poets generally, and with her fellow antipodeans Judith Wright and Dorothy Hewitt in particular. Her vision is cool, sceptical and disabused, enabling her to write excellent political poetry. Her work is by no means confined to the English/New Zealand scene either, and when she turns her attention to Eastern Europe (Romania is an abiding preoccupation after 1984) or Northern Ireland (in "Please Identify Yourself", for example) she is equally perceptive.
Adcock's forays into the imagination's undergrowth are represented in this volume by many fine poems inspired by her dreams. She writes about unconscious experience with detachment and vividness in "I Ride On My High Bicycle", "Mornings After", and the excellent "Gas". In these poems a potentially threatening or chaotic content is held at bay by a highly rational voice, and the results are both fascinating and unsettling.
Adcock seems to have been wary of over-emphasising this aspect of her poetic, though: the selection of work from the late 1970s and early 1980s in particular tends to favour her more discursive, satirical side, and occasionally risks sounding rather jaded and world-weary. In many ways she is deliberately anti-Romantic, suspicious of anything resembling a dying fall, and her wry takes on sexual mores in "Against Coupling", "Choices", and the Ogden Nash-like "Smokers for Celibacy" are genuinely sharp and funny.
The poems from her 1997 collection Looking Back divulge a late, rich seam of inspiration as she excavates - and re-imagines - the lives of her fiery English ancestors. They demonstrate that she is as at home in the past as in the present, or in any of the several continents she writes about. In fact, Poems 1960-2000 shows Fleur Adcock to be a poet who can turn her hand to just about anything.
Caitriona O'Reilly is a poet and critic