Fleur Adcock

 ( 1934 Births ) 

Adcock continued to be viewed as a New Zealand poet despite having left the country years before; in 1974, Alistair Paterson said that she "continues to write from a stance which is essentially that of a New Zealander", and described her as "one of our most important and prolific woman writers". Many of her poems explored her feelings about her New Zealand heritage and contrasted the sparser New Zealand landscape with English countryside. Emma Neale notes that it is fitting that a section in The Inner Harbour (1979) is titled "To and Fro", emphasising "the divided sense of identity Adcock inherits from both family (or historical) emigrant experience and personal expatriation". Other poems dealt with personal experiences and intimate relationships; reviewing The Scenic Route (1974), Paterson observes that she is "conscious ... of the backdrop of loss and death which is common to everybody everywhere". He identifies a sense of reservation or distance in Adcock's poetry, both thematically and from a technical perspective.

In the 1980s, Adcock broadened her literary activity beyond her own poetry and made significant contributions as a translator and editor. She produced translations of medieval Latin lyrics, published as The Virgin & the Nightingale (1983), a translation of the Romanian poet ( Orient Express, 1989) 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. 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.