Looking Back

In the first part of this book, her first since Time Zones (OUP, 1991), poet Fleur Adcock looks at some of her ancestors, from relatively recent figures struggling with hardship and family tragedies in 19th-century Manchester, through rural lives in Midlands villages, to a few prominent heroes and villains in Elizabethan and medieval times. In the second section she returns to more contemporary subjects, such as sex and dreaming--familiar topics of this unsettled but unsparing poet.