The preoccupations with identity and location in Adcock's work and the related emphasis on home and belonging are major ones which define important directions in the development of her talents. Her interrogation of these issues, which has involved negotiations of selfhood through the vectors of time as well as place, offers new contexts for understanding the irony, deflation and mock heroics of her work, her preference for a reticent mode, her strong sense of voice from the outset: all require an appreciation of division, and Adcock's acknowledgement of distance and difference through her double displacement in diaspora has led to a growth of her ironic vision. Likewise her registering of the odd, bizarre and the curious as ways of unsettling and redefining the ordinary has undergone transformations that are identifiable with the opening up of new spaces and creation of new moments of origin. In such ways her multiple journeys, plural subjectivities and multilocational attachments, constitutive of a mode of existence developed over forty years, have mobilized in her verse a searching exploration of various locations, historical moments and encounters.

Issues of identity and location define Adcock's strengths and limitations as a poet: she has always been associated with intimacy and the domestic sphere and this has sometimes led to a perceived slightness of subject matter or archness of voice. Yet her early poems which used conversational address to her children were the foundation of her reputation. Avoiding the grand statement, the totalizing abstraction and the public persona associated with major themes, she has made a virtue of modesty and economy; yet her achievement reveals that the whole is indeed larger than the parts. Her recent preoccupation with discovering and recreating her ancestors, at first an unlikely departure for someone who had been such a decisive presence in the groundswell of women's poetry in Britain in the 1980s, represents another stage in the psychological process of identity formation that Adcock is obsessively engaged with. Her predilection for the motif of retrogression which appears both comically and surrealistically in poems like ‘Regression’ and 'Last Song’ becomes a metaphor for the act of rerouting her life back into the distant past, suggesting that for her this coincides with a return to a simpler state of being, ultimately offering a counter to nostalgia.