Glass wings fleur adcock biography
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This book is in bookshops from today.
I don’t think that Fleur Adcock really needs introduction to most of the poetry reading public. As such I’m going to refrain from telling you much about her. Glass Wings, the most recent in a long line of collections, is a mixed bag for me. I’ll admit that I’m probably not the audience for this work and although in general it seemed a collection of eulogies and wills in poem form there were moments and poems that still grabbed me.
The first section was the one I connected with the least. And this is most likely a failure on my part; other readers may enjoy it more. It is a collection of memories and eulogies. The parts I found most enjoyable were lines with more poetic than prosaic sounds ‘chocolate-box Chiddingstone’ and the more unusual images. Some of the lines about ageing and dying seemed particularly unkind to the subjects.
Whilst I don’t think that poets and writers have an obligati
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Glass Wings
Paperback, 210 x 138mm
80 pages
May 2013
Fleur Adcock’s title refers to the tydlig, 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 fryst vatten 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 writes about men and women, childhood, identity, roots and rootlessness, memory and loss, animals and dreams, as well as our interactions with nature and place. Her poised, ironic poems are remarkable for their wry wit, conversational tone and psychological insight, unmasking the deceptions of love or u
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BiographiesFleur Adcock
born 10 February 1934 in Auckland, NZ
British/New-Zealand poet, editor and translator
Biography • Weblinks
Biography
Fleur Adcock was born in New Zealand but has lived in England since 1963. Her collections of poetry, all published by Bloodaxe, are: Poems 1960-2000 (2000), Dragon Talk (2010) and Glass Wings, (2013). She has also published translations from Romanian and medieval Latin poetry, and edited several anthologies, including The Faber Book of 20th Century Women's Poetry. In 2006 she was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.———A short anecdotal tribute by Jan Kemp
London, March 2011: Fleur & I have arranged to meet in the queue outside Westminster Abbey. There she is, just caught her at the door or I’d never have found her in this crowd. She gets in free as a 65+ Londoner & I pay £15. We whisk round the marble tombs, she pointing out 'ur-great uncle or aunt so and so'