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“... We bought raspberries in the market; but raspberries are discredited: they sag in their bag, fermenting into a froth of suspect juice. And strawberries are seriously compromised: a taint – you must have heard the stories. As for red currants, well, they say the only real red currants are dead. (Don’t you believe it: the fields are full of them, swelling hopefully on their twigs, and the dead ones weren’t red anyway but some mutation of black or white ...”

“... In memory of Pete Laver ‘To Fleur from Pete, on loan perpetual.’ It’s written on the flyleaf of the book I wouldn’t let you give away outright: ‘Just make it permanent loan,’ I said – a joke between librarians, professional jargon. It seemed quite witty, on a night when most things passed for wit. We were all hoarse by then, from laughing at the bits you’d read aloud – the heaving bosoms, blushing sighs, demoniac lips ...”

“... The time is nearly one o’clock, or half-past twelve in Adelaide’ – where the accents aren’t quite so ... Australian as in the other states, the ones that were settled (not their fault, of course) by convicts. We had Systematic Colonisation, and Colonel Light, and the City of Adelaide Plan. We have the Park Lands. It’s time for the news at 1 ...”

“... RomaniaSuddenly it’s gone public; it rushed outinto the light like a train out of a tunnel.People I’ve met are faces in the government,shouting on television, looking older.A man who came to see me once, for breakfastat my hotel, and was dazzlingly indiscreetabout the system – there, in front of the waiters –is Head of Broadcasting this week ...”

“... Ovid, Metamorphoses, IX, 666-797) But that’s nothing to what happened in Crete. Once upon a time there was a man called Ligdus, from near Knossos – a nobody, but freeborn, honourable and decent. His wife was pregnant. When her time was close, this is what he told her: ‘I pray for two things: a painless labour for you, and a son. Girls are more trouble, and I can’t afford one ...”

“... a minor Hindu deity. Of the poets here, Philip Gross and George Szirtes follow Conrad’s route. Fleur Adcock, re-importing a wicked Englishness from the Antipodes, favours Mrs Moore. The others work variations on Forster, with the occasional Conradian divertissement. The son of ‘a Displaced Person from Estonia’, the Gross child came to himself in ...”

“... for you, a skunk spun out of glass And so small as to be almost unbreakable. Three Butterflies For Fleur Adcock Your sister in New Zealand held the telephone Above your mother in her open coffin For you to communicate. How many times Did silence encircle the globe before The peacock butterfly arrived in your room? We all know what the butterfly ...”

“... he not so humorously unassuming, it might seem a wee bit in-groupy: the first poem is dedicated to Fleur Adcock; others are for Edna O’Brien; others modestly describe having his portrait painted. But there is a nice twinkle in Longley’s eye when he remembers ‘That time I shared a lobster with Heaney/(Boston? New York?) he took the bigger claw’ and ...”

“... more than they are to men’s: Wendy Mulford excludes most ‘establishment’ women poets. No Fleur Adcock, Carol Rumens, Carol Ann Duffy and certainly no Fiona Pitt-Kethley or Wendy Cope – which means denying herself, out of petty literary in-fighting, poems that would have strengthened her case. The best poems she does include are the ...”

“... Poetry: Douglas Dunn, Anne Stevenson, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Andrew Motion, Derek Mahon, Fleur Adcock, Carol Rumens, Medbh McGuckian, Penelope Shuttle and others. Geoffrey Hill, Dannie Abse, Denise Levertov, Peter Red-grove, U.A. Fanthorpe, Gillian Clarke, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Elaine Feinstein are all variously represented, opening out the ...”

“... reprints including a Penguin edition. In Spinster (reissued now with a rather prim introduction by Fleur Adcock) Ashton-Warner puts her spinster-teacher Anna Vorontosov in the same ‘pre-fab’ classroom with the same Maori pupils described in Teacher. Into the school comes a young teacher, Paul Vercoe, confused in his feelings and confusing to Anna, who ...”

“... substantial than its predecessor, yet there is a sense of something missing. An early review by Fleur Adcock in Quarto notes the book as having 512 pages though, in fact, it only reaches page 466. It is as if there had been extra pages full of excellent matter that Mr Alpers, feeling it to be too well-known, at the last moment obliterated. He is so ...”

“... Put simply, this anthology should be read for the marvellous poems it contains by Anne Stevenson, Fleur Adcock, Dorothy Hewett, Elizabeth Bishop, Barbara Guest, Carolyn Forché, Miriam Waddington, and Eunice De Souza, whose ‘Marriages are made’ is about an Indian arranged marriage where the girl is first given a complete medical examination before ...”

“... flowers’, seem as old-fashioned as Yeats’s eloquence about country houses by comparison with Fleur Adcock’s ‘The Soho Hospital for Women’: Doris hardly smokes in the ward – And hardly eats more than a dreamy spoonful – but the corridors and bathrooms reek of her Players Number 10, and the drugtrolley pauses for long minutes by her ...”

“... an ‘old-fashioned’ poet like Johnston has more in common with women poets writing today like Fleur Adcock, Carol Rumens and Ruth Fainlight. His verses, like theirs, have nothing against being simple, forceful and straightforward. Modern mannered poets show a latent anxiety about the poem not quite coming off which is quite absent in Ruth ...”