Fleur Adcock

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Fleur Adcock Template:Post-nominals (10 February 1934 – 10 October 2024) was a New Zealand poet, editor and translator. Born in Papakura, New Zealand, and raised partly in England, Adcock spent most of her adult life in the United Kingdom, where she became a prominent figure in contemporary poetry.<ref name=fabc/><ref name="Cooney">Template:Cite web</ref> Her work is characterised by wit, a conversational tone and psychological insights, and explores themes of identity, place and the complexities of human relationships. Over a career spanning more than six decades, she published around 20 poetry collections, and edited influential anthologies such as the Oxford Book of Contemporary New Zealand Poetry (1982). Her contributions to British and New Zealand literature were recognised with significant awards, including the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (2006), an OBE (1996), appointment as a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (2008),<ref name="CNZM">Template:Cite web</ref> and an honorary doctorate of literature from Victoria University of Wellington (2007).<ref name="OCNZL">Template:Cite encyclopedia</ref> She was also a noted translator of medieval Latin and Romanian poetry.

Early life and family

Adcock, the older of two sisters, was born in Papakura to Cyril John Adcock and Irene Robinson Adcock on 10 February 1934.<ref name="Telegraph-Obit" /> Her father was a university professor and psychologist, and her mother was a writer.<ref name="Cooney" /><ref name="OCNZL" /><ref name=":0" /> Adcock's birth name was Kareen Fleur Adcock, but she was known as Fleur and legally changed her name to Fleur Adcock in 1982.<ref name="Cooney" /><ref name="Natlib">Template:Cite web</ref> Her younger sister Marilyn (who became a novelist) was born the following year.<ref name="Guardian Obit">Template:Cite news</ref> In 1939, the family moved to London for Cyril's doctoral studies. The outbreak of World War II meant the family's stay was extended longer than originally planned, and Adcock spent the following eight years of her childhood in England, returning to New Zealand in 1947.<ref name="Against">Template:Cite news</ref><ref name="Cooney" /><ref name=":0" /> She later wrote about how she was reluctant to leave England.<ref name="Stannard">Template:Cite news</ref>

Adcock attended Wellington Girls' College and was awarded the title of dux in 1950.<ref name="Newsroom Obit">Template:Cite news</ref> She studied Classics at Victoria University of Wellington, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1954 and a Masters of Arts in 1956.<ref name="Cooney" /><ref name=":0">Template:Cite book</ref> In 1952, at the age of 18, she married Alistair Te Ariki Campbell; they had two sons and divorced in 1958.<ref name="Cooney" /> They remained on good terms in later years.<ref name="Against"/> In 1962, she married Barry Crump; the marriage only lasted five months, with Adcock later saying Crump was violent towards her.<ref name="Cooney" /><ref name="Against"/><ref name="Vincent">Template:Cite news</ref>

Career

Early career, 1960–1974: academia and librarianships

Adcock moved to Dunedin and began her professional life in academia, after her divorce from Campbell.<ref name="Stannard"/> She also began to seriously engage with writing her own poetry.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> From 1958 to 1962 she worked as an assistant lecturer in classics and librarian at the University of Otago, and from 1962 to 1963 she worked as a librarian at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington.<ref name="Cooney" /><ref name=":0" />

In 1963, Adcock returned permanently to England, where she worked as a librarian at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London until 1979.<ref name="OCNZL" /> She had already had poems published in a few literary journals in New Zealand at this time.<ref name="Wilson">Template:Cite book</ref> In 1963 she was one of a small number of female poets to join the Group under Edward Lucie-Smith.<ref name="Guardian Obit"/> Her first collection of poetry, The Eye of the Hurricane, was published in New Zealand in 1964; it was written largely before she returned to England and introduces the themes of displacement and the ambivalence of belonging that recur in her work.<ref name="OCNZL" /><ref name="Quigley">Template:Cite web</ref><ref name="Ambivalent">Template:Cite journal</ref> In 1967 her collection Tigers was published in the UK by Oxford University Press, including some poems from her earlier collection;<ref name="OCNZL" /><ref name=":0" /> she was to become known as an "Oxford poet".<ref name="Ambivalent"/>

Adcock's 1971 collection High Tide in the Garden marked the first time she had referenced specific New Zealand locations in her writing, through the poems "Ngauranga Gorge Hill" and "Stewart Island", and also included poems about her life in East Finchley, London, and her oldest son's return to New Zealand after visiting Adcock in England.<ref name="Ambivalent"/>

Shift to full-time writing, 1974–1990

In 1975, Adcock returned briefly to New Zealand for the first time since she had left for London. In 1979 she left her librarian role at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and became a full-time writer.<ref name="OCNZL" /> She was the Arts Council Creative Writing Fellow at the Charlotte Mason College of Education in Ambleside from 1977 to 1978, followed by the Northern Arts Literary Fellowship at the universities of Newcastle and Durham from 1979 to 1981.<ref name="Cooney" /><ref name=":0" /><ref name="Wilson" />

From the late 1970s, Adcock worked as a freelance writer, a translator and poetry commentator for the BBC.<ref name="Cooney" /><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> The Guardian observes that through her BBC commentary she "became familiar to many".<ref name="Guardian Obit"/>

Adcock's poetry collections in the 1970s, such as The Inner Harbour (1979), dealt with her feelings about her New Zealand heritage and contrasted the sparser New Zealand landscape with English countryside.<ref name="OCNZL" /> Emma Neale notes that it is fitting that a section in The Inner Harbour is titled "To and Fro", emphasising "the divided sense of identity [Adcock] inherits from both family (or historical) emigrant experience and personal expatriation".<ref name="OCNZL" />

In the 1980s, Adcock broadened her literary activity beyond her own poetry and made significant contributions as a translator and editor.<ref name="OCNZL" /> She produced translations of medieval Latin lyrics, published as The Virgin & the Nightingale (1983), and edited The Oxford Book of Contemporary New Zealand Poetry (1982). Her Selected Poems was published in 1983, and won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry at the 1984 New Zealand Book Awards.<ref name="OCNZL" /><ref name="Read NZ">Template:Cite web</ref> In 1987 she edited the Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Women's Poetry. In the introduction, she states that she rejects the view that "to write truly as a woman one must reject literary traditions merely because they were largely formed by men"; her concern was that women's poetry had historically been under-valued and neglected.<ref name="fabc"/>

Later career and honours: 1990 onwards

Adcock's collections to date were collated into Poems: 1960–2000, published in 2000.<ref name="Guardian Obit"/><ref name="Vincent"/> She did not write poetry for a decade afterwards, saying that she had lost interest and was working instead on her family history.<ref name="Stannard"/> She returned with Dragon Talk in 2010, and subsequently published four additional collections.<ref name="Stannard"/><ref name="Guardian Obit"/>

In 2006, Adcock won one of Britain's top poetry awards, the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, for her collected works, Poems 1960–2000. She was only the seventh female poet to receive the award in its 73 years.<ref name="Queen's Gold">Template:Cite news</ref>

Style and themes

Adcock's poetry is typically concerned with themes of place, human relationships and everyday activities, but frequently with a dark twist given to the mundane events she writes about. Formerly, her early work was influenced by her training as a classicist but her later work is looser in structure and more concerned with the world of the unconscious mind.<ref name="Cooney" /> The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature (2006) notes that her poems are often written from the perspective of an outsider or express a divided sense of identity inherited from her own emigrant experience and separation from New Zealand family.<ref name="OCNZL" />

Death

Adcock died following a short illness on 10 October 2024, at the age of 90.<ref name="Guardian Obit"/><ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref name="Telegraph-Obit">Template:Cite news</ref>

Poetry collections

  • 1964: The Eye of the Hurricane, Wellington: Reed<ref name="faua">Template:Cite web</ref>
  • 1967: Tigers, London: Oxford University Press<ref name=faua/>
  • 1971: High Tide in the Garden, London: Oxford University Press<ref name=faua/>
  • 1974: The Scenic Route, London and New York: Oxford University Press<ref name=faua/>
  • 1979: The Inner Harbour, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press<ref name=faua/>
  • 1979: Below Loughrigg, Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books<ref name=faua/>
  • 1983: Selected Poems, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press<ref name=faua/>
  • 1986: Hotspur: a ballad, Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books<ref name=faua/> Template:ISBN
  • 1986: The Incident Book, Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press<ref name=faua/>
  • 1988: Meeting the Comet, Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books<ref name=faua/>
  • 1991: Time-zones, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press<ref name=faua/>
  • 1997: Looking Back, Oxford and Auckland: Oxford University Press<ref name=faua/>
  • 2000: Poems 1960–2000, Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books<ref name=faua/> Template:ISBN
  • 2010: Dragon Talk, Tarset: Bloodaxe Books <ref name=fabc/> Template:ISBN
  • 2013: Glass Wings, Tarset: Bloodaxe Books and Wellington, NZ: Victoria University Press.<ref name="VUP">Template:Cite web</ref>
  • 2014: The Land Ballot, Wellington, NZ: Victoria University Press, Tarset: Bloodaxe Books.<ref name="VUP" />
  • 2017: Hoard, Wellington, NZ: Victoria University Press, Hexham: Bloodaxe Books.<ref name="VUP" />
  • 2019: Collected Poems, Wellington, NZ: Victoria University Press.<ref name="VUP" />
  • 2021: The Mermaid's Purse, Wellington, NZ: Victoria University Press, Hexham: Bloodaxe Books.<ref name="VUP" />
  • 2024: Collected Poems, Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, Wellington, NZ: Te Herenga Waka University Press.<ref name="VUP" />

Edited or translated

  • 1982: Editor, Oxford Book of Contemporary New Zealand Poetry, Auckland: Oxford University Press<ref name=faua/>
  • 1983: Translator, The Virgin and the Nightingale: Medieval Latin poems, Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books,<ref name=faua/> Template:ISBN
  • 1987: Editor, Faber Book of 20th Century Women's Poetry, London and Boston: Faber and Faber<ref name=faua/>
  • 1989: Translator, Orient Express: Poems. Grete Tartler, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press<ref name=faua/>
  • 1992: Translator, Letters from Darkness: Poems, Daniela Crasnaru, Oxford: Oxford University Press<ref name=faua/>
  • 1994: Translator and editor, Hugh Primas and the Archpoet, Cambridge, England, and New York: Cambridge University Press<ref name=faua/>
  • 1995: Editor (with Jacqueline Simms), The Oxford Book of Creatures, verse and prose anthology, Oxford: Oxford University Press<ref name=faua/>

Awards and honours

References

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