New Zealand poet, lived in the UK most of her life. Anyone heard of her? She wrote Against Coupling and Kissing and that one about being kind to snails - some brilliant stuff, she's quite well-known, you'd find her in lots of poetry anthologies
Anyway was coming out of the library in Pearse St on Tuesday night and a woman says to me 'Do you know where Fleur Adcock is speaking?', turned out she was doing a reading and a public interview in the library so in I went. Twas deadly to see her in the flesh or rather hear her read some of her poems, even though, for some reason, they had an enormous amount of reverb on the mics (in a small room) which made her voice sound very unreal. The 'interview' was less worthwhile ... you know the expression 'he loves the sound of his own voice' and it's a figure of speech? Well, the interviewer really did seem to love the sound of his own voice, just to enjoy hearing himself talking, it was kind of off-putting, also he was very interested in showing how much homework he'd done, quoting various critics' comments on her work, which was very English-in-school and not very interesting
Still though, it's not every day you get to see a world-class poet in your local library, and it was free in
Anyway was coming out of the library in Pearse St on Tuesday night and a woman says to me 'Do you know where Fleur Adcock is speaking?', turned out she was doing a reading and a public interview in the library so in I went. Twas deadly to see her in the flesh or rather hear her read some of her poems, even though, for some reason, they had an enormous amount of reverb on the mics (in a small room) which made her voice sound very unreal. The 'interview' was less worthwhile ... you know the expression 'he loves the sound of his own voice' and it's a figure of speech? Well, the interviewer really did seem to love the sound of his own voice, just to enjoy hearing himself talking, it was kind of off-putting, also he was very interested in showing how much homework he'd done, quoting various critics' comments on her work, which was very English-in-school and not very interesting
Still though, it's not every day you get to see a world-class poet in your local library, and it was free in