Fleur Adcock's Dragon Talk featured on BBC Radio 4's A Good Read
FLEUR ADCOCK’S DRAGON TALK DISCUSSED ON BBC RADIO 4’s A GOOD READ
A Good Read, BBC Radio 4, Monday 14 July 2025, 3pm
The late Fleur Adcock’s 2010 collection Dragon Talk was discussed on BBC Radio 4’s A Good Read on 14 July 2025. It was the choice of presenter Harriett Gilbert. The collection was also enjoyed by the two guests on the programme, Desiree Akhavan and Rosie Wilby.
‘The centrepiece of the book is really a memoir written as a sequence of poems. They’re very witty – some of them I find actually heartbreaking [...] I really like these poems – I like Fleur Adcock generally.’ – Harriett Gilbert, BBC Radio 4’s A Good Read, introducing her choice: Dragon Talk
‘I really loved this collection […] it feels like a really delicate collection of these gentle but sharply witty memories of really formative years during the war. […] there’s something cinematic about them.’ – Desiree Akhavan
All the poems from the collection are included in Fleur Adcock’s 2024 Collected Poems, but Dragon Talk remains available as a separate edition. A reprint was put through ahead of the broadcast, but a few copies of the first edition remain available for purchase via the Bloodaxe website at the original price of £7.99.
Previous Bloodaxe titles to be chosen for the programme are Imtiaz Dharker’s Over the Moon and the late Helen Dunmore’s final collection Inside the Wave.
‘ALL FOURS by Miranda July, chosen by Desiree Akhavan; UNTRUE by Wednesday Martin, chosen by Rosie Wilby; DRAGON TALK by Fleur Adcock, chosen by Harriett Gilbert
Filmmaker and writer Desiree Akhavan joins comedian, writer and podcaster Rosie Wilby as they discuss favourite books with Harriett Gilbert. Desiree's choice is All Fours by Miranda July, a novel about a perimenopausal woman's sexual awakening on an unusual road trip. By coincidence, Rosie Wilby chooses a non-fiction book which looks at research into women's sexuality, Untrue by Wednesday Martin. Harriett's choice is a volume of poetry by Fleur Adcock, dealing with matters of family and childhood.’
The programme remains available on BBC Sounds. Dragon Talk features from 18:54.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002fv8g
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After the appearance of Fleur Adcock's Poems 1960-2000 she wrote no more poems for several years. This cessation coincided with – but was not entirely caused by – her giving up smoking. When poetry returned to her in 2003 it tended towards a sparer, more concentrated style. Dragon Talk, published in 2010, reflected her continuing preoccupations with family matters and her ambivalent feelings about her native New Zealand.
Her initial inspiration was the letters her father wrote home from England to his parents during World War II, which evoked her own memories of that era. The central sequence moves from her first coming to consciousness in New Zealand up to and through the war years in Britain and on to sketches from her teens in puritanical postwar Wellington after her reluctant return – not without her usual sardonic eye for incongruities and absurdities. There are also affectionate poems for her grandchildren and her late mother.
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. She received an OBE in 1996, and The Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2006 for Poems 1960-2000 (Bloodaxe Books, 2000). In October 2019 Fleur Adcock was presented with the New Zealand Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry 2019 by the Rt Hon (now Dame) Jacinda Ardern.
This first complete edition of Fleur Adcock's poetry was published on 10 February 2024, her 90th birthday, superseding her earlier retrospective, Poems 1960-2000, with the addition of five later collections published by Bloodaxe, 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. All her most celebrated poems are here, from the highly entertaining 'Against Coupling', 'Smokers For Celibacy' and 'The Prize-winning Poem' to modern classics such as 'The Ex-Queen Among the Astronomers' and 'Things'.
‘Fleur’s deceptively relaxed conversational style is often barbed with an oblique take on reality. As the poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy said: “The sharper edge of her talent is encountered like a razor blade in a peach.” Her poetry deals with life’s surprises and oddities, the unexpected or unexplained that can cut the ground from beneath your feet.’ – Janet Wilson, paying tribute to Fleur Adcock in The Guardian
'Fleur Adcock, the New Zealand-born poet, who has died aged 90, was one of the most celebrated and influential voices in British poetry … A poet of direct, often irreverent, observation and precise emotional intelligence rather than overdone, flowery epiphanies, Fleur Adcock converted her own memories and musings into deceptively artless poetry which seemed almost conversational, giving the reader a sense of familiarity that comes from shared assumptions and experiences.' – The Telegraph
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Fleur Adcock launched her Collected Poems with a reading at London Review Bookshop on 13 February 2024 (podcast available here) and took part in Bloodaxe’s online reading and discussion event on 20 February 2024. A film of her reading at Newcastle Poetry Festival in May 2024 is below.
Fleur Adcock reading poems from her Collected Poems at Newcastle Poetry Festival in May 2024
Online launch reading by Fleur Adcock, Kerry Hardie and Aoife Lyall, 20 February 2024
Fleur Adcock, Kerry Hardie and Aoife Lyall celebrated the publication of their new books with an online launch reading on our YouTube channel. All three poets read live and discussed their work with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. This free Bloodaxe launch event is now available to watch on this YouTube page: https://youtube.com/live/_dLjHYNGf1Y.
Tuesday 13 February 2024, 7pm
London Review Bookshop, 14 Bury Pl, London WC1A 2JL
Launch of Collected Poems
Fleur Adcock launched her Collected Poems in person at London Review Bookshop on 13 February 2024. She read from the book and was in conversation with Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley.
A podcast is available via the link below.
https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/podcasts-video/podcasts/fleur-adcock-collected-poems
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Fleur Adcock’s Collected Poems was discussed as the first item on the Irish podcast Books for Breakfast on 29 February 2024. Hosts Peter Sirr and Enda Wyley discussed the book and read favourite poems from it – Enda read ‘The Russian War’ and Peter read a ‘properly angry’ poem from the sequence in memory of Fleur’s good friend Roy Fisher: ‘Dead Poets’ Society’.
Fleur Adcock was discussed first. Fellow Bloodaxe poets were interviewed ahead of their Dublin launch: Kerry Hardie features from 7:09 and Aoife Lyall from 18:50.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1162427/14601325
‘Fleur Adcock’s Collected Poems is a vast treasure chest of vivid, memorable poetry.’ – Edmund Prestwich, London Grip
This wonderful in-depth review can be read in full online at London Grip here.
'One of the advantages about a collected edition is that it enables the reader to gain an insight into a poet’s development and to gauge the extent to which his or her style has changed over time. In the case of Adcock, the barometer has hardly moved at all: her work has been consistently good right from the start [...] The relaxed, conversational style that has become her hallmark over the years is a testament to the power of plain words when placed within a poetic context [...] This major retrospective of her work will be welcomed with enthusiasm by all who wish to study in depth the span of Adcock’s literary career.' – Neil Leadbeater, Write Out Loud
Read the review in full here.
'This monumental Collected serves as a historical document – hundreds of snapshots, in the backgrounds of which pass millions of lives – as much as an artistic one, the sixty-year-long record of a piercing, curious mind. Adcock’s poems have the confidential feel of a private journal, all witty asides and wry observations, following her imagination into her ancestors’ past, her youth during the war, old loves and friendships. A book like this is a rare thing indeed, a life lived in poems.' – Dave Coates, Poetry Book Society Spring Bulletin 2024
Fleur Adcock reads nine poems
Fleur Adcock reads nine poems from her Collected Poems: ‘The Video’, ‘For a Five-Year-Old’, ‘The Pangolin’, ‘An Illustration to Dante’, ‘Things’, Weathering’, ‘For Heidi with Blue Hair’, ‘Where They Lived’ and Counting’. Pamela Robertson-Pearce filmed Fleur Adcock at her home in London on 29 June 2007. This film is from the DVD-anthology In Person: 30 Poets, filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce & edited by Neil Astley (Bloodaxe Books, 2008).
[02 July 2025]
