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This expanded edition of Fleur Adcock’s Collected Poems, first published in hardback in 2019, includes her latest collection The Mermaid's Purse, and twenty new poems. It is published simultaneously with Bloodaxe Books (UK) on the occasion of Fleur Adcock’s 90th birthday on 10 February 2024.
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 unravelling family lives.
‘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
'It’s an affirming and hugely worthwhile project, bringing all this together: the proof of a life bound to language, and to the people language has allowed this poet to reach.' —Sophie van Waardenberg, Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books
Born in Auckland in 1934, Fleur Adcock was a New Zealand poet, editor and translator who resided in Britain. She published many collections of poems, and her awards include the 1961 Festival of Wellington Poetry Award, the Jessie Mackay Prize in 1968 and 1972, the Buckland Award in 1968 and 1979, the New Zealand National Book Award in 1984, an OBE in 1986, the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2006, and a CNZM for services to literature in 2008.
