Fleur Adcock's message

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32703, 4 September 1971, Page 10

Fleur Adcock's message

(Reviewed by H. D. MeN) High Tide In The Ocean. By Finer Adcock. Oxford. 36 pp. Fleur Adcock is alive and well and living in London; she is still Fleur Adcock, she is still writing poetry, and she still seems to regard herself as the pioneer discoverer of sex. Ana this, the reader thinks to himself in the middle of this book, is about all the ■news contained in “High Tide in the Garden.” The carnal theme is again prominent, and here it is worth distinguishing between sex poetry and love poetry: Fleur Adcock has always been fairly prolific as a sex poet, but love poetry seems to be beyond her. Critics have often observed her penchant for dealing with relationships in her verse, but her style has always been to give a personal, one-sided commentary on a sex contract with a very vaguely-depicted male. There are several reasons why Adcock’s sex poetry is no longer of real value or significance. In the first place, its tone is just a female counterpart to the ostentatious virility that characterised the poetry of Fairburn (and numerous others) 30 years ago. The Fairbum-Glover style was very much a male rite; all that Adcock has done is to insist on female representation in a literary brotherhood that the men have forgotten about long since. Further, all the misplaced energy that she has thrown into her performance has, at most, only broken a local record: by international standards she is well behind the times. Thus with most of these new poems one’s only response is to admire incidental turns of phrase, and to feel sorry for the poef. However, very good compensation comes in the eight-page poem with which the volume concludes. Apart from the length, "Gas” seems to be the biggest poem Adcock has written: whereas most of her others are concerned only with relatively trivial incidents and problems, this poem attempts to come to terms with her whole self. For a similar style, one reluctantly thinks of Sylvia Plath—reluctantly because evoking the name of Plath raises a criterion that can only belittle Adcock. With “Gas,” as with none other of her poems, one has the feeling that the writing has come as an inspired rush, a purging force rather than a sedentary discipline.