"Dragon Talk" by Fleur Adcock (Bloodaxe, 2010)

Poems from Agenda, Ambit, PN Review, Poetry Review, The Rialto, TLS, etc.

The title poem is 4 pages of misunderstandings that voice recognition can make, the name of the software being exploited.

I can't blame you for homonyms, but surely after a decade you could manage the last word of Cherry Tree 'Would'? ... You're hopeless at birds: can't get wren into your head - too tiny, you try to tell me: it comes out as rain or ring. ... What am I thinking of, dragon bird? How could I forget that you too have wings?

It was a Guardian poem of the week. Wow.

She knows how to add just enough to a text so that the piece isn't a complete waste, though texts like "Lollies", "3 September 1939", "Just in case", etc, fail even that minimal requirement. The best lines are usually at the end - "I'm drawing a face. Inside my head I can see it clearly, but my fingers won't do what I tell them. It turns out to be a round patch of scribble. It looks more like the world" (p.14), "The milk she squeezes out of the cow turns into butter when she churns it. Life's mysterious, but I'm used to that." (p.15), "Life makes a lot more sense when you can spell" (p.16), etc. Looked upon generously, the line breaks are superfluous. Pieces like "Mr Dolman" and "Biro" are innocuous even with the line breaks removed.

Other reviews

• Julian Stannard (These beautifully crafted poems are full of laconic punchlines)

"Glass Wings" by Fleur Adcock (Bloodaxe, 2013)

There are 70 pages of work in this PBS recommendation. The back-cover blurbs pre-emptively mention that she has "a deceptively laid-back tone", that her "style is deceptively simple", and that "she has made a fine art from holding on to principles of orderliness and good clear sense".

I'd call the first poem, "At the Crossing", prose. It seems laid-back - I like it. But "Fox" shows what happens when there's no deception. In "An 80th Birthday Card for Roy" it says of birds that "They would certainly fly more gracefully than my stumbling public-private poem (you know how tricky such commissions are - although you'd bring to them your customary elegance, intelligence and wit)". Well yes, there are many i.m./celebratory. public-private poems in this book.

"Charon" begins with "Where is Dr Shipman when we need him to ferry us across the fatal stream and land us gently in Elysium" and later has "Life was OK, but it went on too long", which some readers might think daring. There's a section entitled "My Life with Arthropods" which mostly comprises themed lists of anecdotes - "Flea" in particular sounds too much like notes for articles. There's the odd surprise - in "Wet Feet" (about damsel-fly nymphs) we read that "They were grubs, really, naked inside their cunningly decorated sleeping-bags. You wouldn't have wanted to undress one".

"William Clayton, 1725" is so prose, with a wry punchline. Punchlines precariously support several of the poems - "I shall never understand him" (p.15); "I don't regret the kiss" (p.17); "I'd quite like to be forgiven again" (p.19).

Other reviews

• Fiona Sampson (Guardian) (Adcock is a literary writer in her limpid, apparently artless style and the precise emotional intelligence of her observations)
• Janet Wilson (Glass Wings is full of such delights and shows Adcock on top of her form)
• Emma Barnes (I’ll admit that I’m probably not the audience for this work and although in general it seemed a collection of eulogies and wills in poem form there were moments and poems that still grabbed me)
• Rob MacKenzie (Elsewhere) (Well, the collection isn’t flawless, but is worth reading for the good poems, which tend to be very good indeed. )