ADCOCK AND FEM INISM IN THE 1980s

Along with the vexed question of her nationality, gender is the centrally defining preoccupation for Adcock. It inspires her most cutting wit and creative powers. Carol Ann Duffy's reference to ‘a razor blade in the peach’ sums up Adcock's enthusiasm for, yet scathing sharpness about men. But early poems such as ‘Incident’ and ‘Knife-play∧ which articulate an ambivalence about intimacy and a dangerously compulsive attraction to the role of victim, suggest an experience of identity crisis through relationships in ways that issues of nationhood and belonging can be seen to refract and reflect. Such blurring may reflect Adcock's own era, before the women's question achieved its own form of politicization, when it was spoken for by the discourse of nationalism. She herself notes that the dislocations of place compound and merge with those of gender: ‘Wherever I happen to live I have always some residual feeling of being an outsider.’ Then asks: ‘But now I wonder: has being a woman contributed to this? Are women natural outsiders?’ But gender, she claims, has not disadvantaged her in the way that her New Zealand nationality did.

Adcock's handling of gender issues has attracted more critical attention than the issue of her nationality, particularly after the extraordinary decade of the 1980s which saw Thatcherite policies disadvantaging the working class and other minority groups at the time that the sexual revolution became entrenched and women began proclaiming new freedoms for themselves. Adcock came to be associated with public discourses about the role and identity of women and helped to foreground in the public mind issues which had long preoccupied her. She was a somewhat conspicuous figure in the post-Plath sixties and seventies, as she had been earlier in New Zealand, when women poets were, relatively speaking, a novelty; her career has developed in tandem with the emerging public consciousness about women's liberation. Her closest female contemporary is Anne Stevenson and she is often associated with Patricia Beer and Elizabeth Jennings. She gained a reputation in the 1980s for commenting on personal relationships, and for promoting a female consciousness and her work was included in two feminist anthologies: Jeni Couzyn's Bloodaxe Contemporary Women Poets and Carol Rumen's anthology of forty-eight poets, Making for the Open (both 1985); it culminated in her editing the Faber Book of Twentieth Century Women's Poetry (1987).