Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Fleur Adcock
Standard Name: Adcock, Fleur
Birth Name: Kareen Fleur Adcock
Married Name: Kareen Fleur Campbell
Married Name: Kareen Fleur Crump
Born a New Zealander, but an Englishwoman by adoption, FA
is a later twentieth-century poet. She has also done notable work as a translator, anthologist, and critic, but whereas many poets of her generation have given a major part of their attention to novels or children's writing, she has focussed on her poetry above all else.
EF
published with Hutchinson
in 1973 (the same year as her third novel, The Glass Alembic) a poetry volume entitled The Celebrants, from which Fleur Adcock
selected the poem Lais for The Faber...
Anthologization
Elaine Feinstein
From this too Adcock
chose a poem, Patience, for The Faber Book of Twentieth Century Women's Poetry.
Textual Features
Carol Ann Duffy
She selected slightly more carols by women than by men, and recalled that Christina Rossetti
's In the Bleak Midwinter was the result of a commission from Scribner's Monthly in 1872. Her own contribution concerns...
Reception
Elizabeth Daryush
Yvor Winters
looked on The Last Man and Other Verses as having begun ED
's mastery of her new subject-matter.
Davie, Donald, and Elizabeth Daryush. “Introduction”. Collected Poems, Carcanet New Press, pp. 13-23.
16
In 1936 he wrote of her as increasingly conscious of social injustice, of the...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Daryush
ED
's Times obituary called her a self-possessed traditionalist, unimpressed by the twentieth century, with a clear mind, an agile and introspective wit, and nobility of rhythm,but with no gift for metaphor and other...
Publishing
Jeni Couzyn
In the late 1960s a male friend of JC
passed on to her a commission for an anthology of love poems by women. The publisher had delicate lyrics in mind, and was horrified at Couzyn's...
GC
has contributed poems to more than half a dozen journals, Welsh, English, and American, and most frequently to Poetry Wales, the New Welsh Review, and Poetry Nation Review (PNR). She has reviewed...
After a year or so living in London (in the East Finchley flat of the poet Fleur Adcock
), she moved to Bath, where she bought a small house with money provided by her...
Anthologization
Elizabeth Bishop
Fleur Adcock
reprinted the crucial sentence of this letter, by request of Bishop's executor, at the head of poems by her included in The Faber Book of Twentieth Century Women's Poetry, 1987.
Literary responses
Elizabeth Bishop
Sylvia Plath
, who began with negative comments about EB
, later developed admiration for her fine originality, always surprising, never rigid, flowing, juicier than Marianne Moore
who is her godmother.
Rees-Jones, Deryn. “Writing ELIZABETH”. Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery, edited by Linda Anderson and Jo Shapcott, Bloodaxe Books, pp. 42-62.
44
Fleur Adcock
notes...
Literary responses
Patricia Beer
British Book News was as grudging about the 1975 PEN
poetry anthology as it was the same year (1976) about Driving West. It reported that this series plods on with safe, unexciting choices, though...
