Glass Wings

Poetry Book Society Recommendation

Fleur Adcock's title refers to the transparent, 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 is 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.

Fleur Adcock (1934-2024) was 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 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 also wrote movingly of birth, death and bereavement, and has tackled political issues with honest indignation and caustic wit.

Her first Bloodaxe retrospective, Poems 1960-2000, was followed by five further collections, all of which remain available as separate editions. They are also included in full in her Collected Poems. This first complete edition of her poetry was published on her 90th birthday in February 2024, superseding her earlier retrospective, with the addition of Dragon Talk (2010), Glass Wings (2013), The Land Ballot (2015), Hoard (2017) and The Mermaid's Purse (2021), along with a gathering of 20 new poems.