Fleur Adcock has been an enormous presence in the New Zealand poetry world; sadly she died earlier this year, not too long ago actually, and in response I picked up a copy of one of her last poetry collections from the library. A memorial read, as it were. She started writing the poems in this book when she was in her early eighties, which makes me happy, and they are gentle, lucid, lovely examples of looking back, many of them, interspersed with birds and travel. I'd like a copy of this myself, I think - mostly for one of the longer poems in the collection, "The Teacher's Wife", which is simultaneously about Adcock's mother, the isolation of island life, and the temptation of drowning (drowning does loom large in the NZ literary canon, so it was quietly amusing to see it pop up here as well).