Something about Fleur Adcock

Gorgeous, brainy, reckless - poet Fleur Adcock is a woman of complex reputation, writes MARGIE THOMSON.

She is instantly recognisable, even by one who has never seen her before. The slight, straight, black-clad figure walking purposefully through the blustery morning is the poet Fleur Adcock, one of New Zealand's best-known literary exports.

Even at a distance, as she turns in the gate at her son's Western Springs house, one can see what it was that the men used to (and probably still do) go crazy about, for she is still, at 67, strikingly beautiful.

"The men were around her like bees to a honey pot," remembers one peripheral acquaintance from past days when she, although an ex-pat since 1963, was linked to the local literary scene through figures like Maurice Shadbolt (having already been married to poet Alistair Campbell, with whom she had two children, and, more oddly and disastrously, to Barry Crump).

Adcock remains a woman of complex reputation, which goes to show the danger of ever forming a one-sided opinion about anyone. Gracious is probably a better word than nice, her friendliness tempered by a slight reserve that is utterly her right.

Talkative, she is a great raconteur who sometimes probably gives away more than she means to and then gets cross. Her spiky intellectualism is softened by a charm that has the photographer sitting spellbound for nearly an hour after he has finished shooting. Out of vanity or shyness she hates being photographed, pulling on her shade-lensed glasses, wishing she had a veil.

Gorgeous, brainy, reckless ... It is perhaps not strange that she and sister Marilyn Duckworth and the permissive, literary milieu of which they were a part of in the 1950s and 1960s should now be the focus of avid interest as New Zealanders go all out to create a cultural legacy for themselves. But Adcock is bemused and probably resentful of the attention which, she insists, only happens here. Actually, she is a significant name in poetry in Britain and New Zealand, included in school syllabuses, frequently invited to literary festivals, her name even whispered in connection with the title Poet Laureate, although she dismisses this as soon as it's mentioned.

Adcock's name can spark recognition in the unlikeliest of places, such as at the Post Office where the guy behind the counter confided admiringly to her that her poem, Against Coupling (I write in praise of the solitary act:/ of not feeling a trespassing tongue/ forced into one's mouth ... ) was an old favourite.

Adcock can be extremely funny and even distinctly low-brow (to wit, Smokers for Celibacy: Some of us are a little tired of hearing that cigarettes kill./ We'd like to warn you about another way of making yourself ill:/ we suggest that in view of AIDS, herpes, chlamydia, cystitis and NSU,/ not to mention genital warts and cervical cancer and the proven connection/ between the two,/ if you want to avoid turning into physical wrecks/ what you should give up is not smoking but sex ... ) and loves reading to mellow, well-oiled audiences where she can display the quick wit and panache that has accompanied her to the heart of the London literary scene.

But if you were to choose from her considerable canon of the poems that are most loved, the ones people are most likely to stick on their fridge doors until they fall apart at the Sellotaped corners, you'd have to go for The Keepsake, or The Chiffonier, the 1986 poems the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature has described as her most moving elegiac works.

Which is fitting, given that this is a woman, we should remember, who has just lost her mother.

Irene Adcock, herself a poet, died at the end of July, aged 93, eluding (as she had always threatened) her daughter's last rush to her side. Adcock knows she is exceptionally lucky to have had her mother for so much of her own life, but it is still a terrible shock. "We've been distant in miles, but always very close."

It was her mother with whom she stayed in London after she fled from New Zealand. It was to her mother that the lastingly powerful The Chiffonier was written.

"You're glad I like the chiffonier. But I

feel suddenly uneasy, scenting why

you're pleased I like this pretty thing you've bought,

the twin of one that stood beside your cot

when you were small: you've marked it down for me;

it's not too heavy to be sent by sea

when the time comes, and it's got space inside

to pack some other things you've set aside,

things that are small enough to go by water

twelve thousand miles to me, your English daughter."

Most poignant of all, the last line strikes at the heart with its searing simplicity:

"I want my mother, not her chiffonier."

Well, in fact she's not going to take the chiffonier, she says. While she has a sad fortnight ahead of her sorting out her mother's Wellington home she has already decided about that famous piece of furniture.

"I can't fit it in the house, so it's going to skip a generation and Andrew's going to have it. She points to the gap on her son's wall perfect. "She'd [her mother] be very happy with that, anyway."

* Fleur Adcock reads and discusses her work in the Titirangi Memorial Hall at the Going West Festival today at 2.30 pm and appears on a panel about Maurice Duggan at 4.30 pm. Tomorrow she features in a session on Barry Crump at 10.15 am.