Review: The Mermaid’s Purse

Fleur Adcock is a New Zealand poet who has lived in Britain for much of her life. She has published multiple poetry collections and won numerous awards including the Jessie Mackay Prize in 1968, the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2006, a CNZM for services to literature in 2008 and the Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry in 2019. She began writing the poems in The Mermaid’s Purse at age 82.

Reading my way through every poetry book penned by Adcock was a highlight of my research for my book Wild Honey: Reading New Zealand Women’s Poetry. Adcock’s poems delight, provoke and never lose touch with human concerns. She gets personal, she observes closely, and she sometimes makes me laugh out loud. The Mermaid’s Purse reminds me, as all her other collections have done, that poetry is most definitely a form of travel.

The Mermaid’s Purse moves between places with vital attachments (New Zealand and Britain) and, in doing so, moves through the remembered, the felt, the imagined. I sit and read the collection, cover to cover, on holiday beside the dazzling ocean and white Northland sand. I am reading Island Bay, a poem near the start of the book and keep moving between the dazzle of Adcock’s lines and the dazzle of the sea. Here are the first two stanzas:

Bright specks of neverlastingness

float at me out of the blue air,

perhaps constructed by my retina

which these days constructs so much else,

or by the air itself, the limpid sky,

the sea drenched in its turquoise liquors

Both lucid and luminous, this exquisite poem sets the mind travelling. I’m reminded these poems were written in an old age. “Neverlasting” is the word that unthreads you. It leads to the infinite sky, and then to the inability of the ocean and life itself to stay still or the same, to old age.

The collection addresses friends and family, admired poets. There are mermaids, birds, bats, sheep, clouds, a wedding dress, water divining, dusty-cupboard treasure troves. The tone is reflective, searching, sure-footed with Adcock’s characteristic wit close at hand. Scenes and memories are replayed. I particularly love The Fountain. Adcock is out walking (travelling!) and we get to tag along and eavesdrop. Just as with the Island Bay poem, the crosshatch of quiet observation, opinion and physical setting elevates you as read. Take a listen:

Hats are all very well, but the best shade

is an umbrella of leaves, high up, to

sit under catching words from passers-by –

‘But then what if you’re making a salad;

do you wash it in bottled water? Or

what do you do?’ And they move out of range.

I amble along the path. ‘This fountain

is being repaired and has been turned off.’

(‘Like the sky, you could say, these last long weeks.’)

Adcock’s small poems are treats to stall on. In the Cloud moves you from flirting to the white cliffs of nowhere. Again, Adcock’s poetic wit plays with words and ideas, with things that have been, and things that never were.

Near the end of the book, a sequence honours British poet, Roy Fisher (1930 – 2017). In An April Bat, the bat appears as a sign from her departed friend.

Birds, we used to send each other:

a woodpecker, a jay. But this

is for the dark time.

Don’t think I value it less

for being a cliché. You know

I haven’t an original mind.

You were generous enough

to send me a thing I’d understand.

Adcock’s poems are gifts sent to readers: intricacies to travel with, original thinking to delight in, poetry to dawdle over and savour.

Reviewed by Paula Green