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Bloodaxe Books Archive Adcock, Fleur, 1934 - , poet and editor
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Below Loughrigg

Consists of an annotated typescript relating to the Below Loughrigg by Fleur Adcock. Below Loughrigg was Fleur Adcock's first book to be published by Bloodaxe Books.

Adcock, Fleur, 1934 - , poet and editor

Dragon Talk

Consists of letters and manuscripts relating to the Dragon Talk by Fleur Adcock.
After the appearance of Fleur Adcock's Poems 1960-2000 she wrote no more poems for several years. This cessation coincided with – but was not entirely caused by – her giving up smoking. When poetry returned to her in 2003 it tended towards a sparer, more concentrated style. This new collection continues to reflect her preoccupations with family matters and with her ambivalent feelings about her native New Zealand.

Her initial inspiration was the letters her father wrote home from England to his parents during World War II, which evoked her own memories of that era. The central sequence moves from her first coming to consciousness in New Zealand up to and through the war years in Britain and on to sketches from her teens in puritanical postwar Wellington after her reluctant return – not without her usual sardonic eye for incongruities and absurdities. There are also affectionate poems for her grandchildren and her late mother.

Adcock, Fleur, 1934 - , poet and editor

Fleur Adcock

Consists of letters and proofs relating to the published poetry works of Fleur Adcock.

Adcock, Fleur, 1934 - , poet and editor

Glass Wings

Consists of letters and manuscripts relating to the Glass Wings by Fleur Adcock.
Fleur Adcock’s title refers to the transparent, glittering wings of some of the species – bees, mosquitoes, dragonflies – celebrated or lamented in a sequence of poems on encounters with arthropods, from the stick insects and crayfish of her native New Zealand to the clothes' moths that infest her London house. There is an elegy for the once abundant caterpillars of her English childhood, while other sections of the book include elegies for human beings and poems based on family wills from the 16th to the 20th centuries, as well as birthday greetings for old friends and for a new great-grandson.

Adcock, Fleur, 1934 - , poet and editor

Poems 1960-2000

Consists of letters and manuscripts relating to the Poems 1960-2000 by Fleur Adcock.

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. All her most celebrated poems are here, from the highly entertaining 'Against Coupling', 'Smokers For Celibacy' and 'The Prize-Winning Poem' to modern classics such as 'The Ex-Queen Amongst the Astronomers' and 'Things' - as well as the notorious one about kissing John Prescott…

Adcock, Fleur, 1934 - , poet and editor

The Virgin & the Nightingale: Medieval Latin Poems

Consists of letters and manuscripts relating to the The Virgin & the Nightingale: Medieval Latin Poems by Fleur Adcock.
These poems are about birds - particularly the nightingale - and young women. Most are by monks or clerics, and most are rather rude.

Several are by Peter of Blois, a scholar and diplomat who turned to religion in his later years and disclaimed the brilliant erotic verses of his youth. The middle section of the book presents a selection of poems by this highly accomplished and entertaining writer - who was political secretary to Henry II and later to his widow Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Many of the poems were rhymed, unlike classical Latin poetry, and wherever possible Fleur Adcock has attempted to reproduce the form and rhyme-scheme of the original. In these ratty and lively translations Fleur Adcock combines classical scholarship with her own poetic flair and technical skill. The Latin poems are printed alongside her verse translations.

Adcock, Fleur, 1934 - , poet and editor