Poems 1960-2000 Read online

  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,