Adcock's heightened ability to resolve conflict and relativize differences in poems written in the 1980s and 1990s, evidence of a more dialogic, reconciliatory mode, is manifested through a rehandling of earlier themes - creatures, travel and journeys - and the introduction of new concerns such as the state of the environment. Time-Zones (1991) exhibits the fluidly mobile diasporic subject whose multi-locational attachments enable transitions between different points of view, traversal of the boundaries between different species, states of being and cultures, and the creation of hybrid identities. New spaces are registered, familiar ones are revisited and revised from more global perspectives: poems about eco-politics embracing issues concerning the environment and climate change, poems about journeys, represented by air travel and the transitions between time-zones, coexist with those about her life in East Finchley. Adcock's perception about social attitudes to disability and disease is sharpened while her increased consciousness of mortality and the vulnerability of all species emphasizes the precariousness of the boundary between life and death.

CREATURES OF DREAM AND THE EVERYDAY

Adcock's passion for the natural world (Poems, 279), and observations about the habits of creatures have inspired some of her most original perceptions - the caterpillar, for example, is seen as ‘that moistly munching hoop of innocent green’ (Poems, 88) - and her most popular poems. In early poems dream and nightmare produce distortions of nature. The title of her second volume, Tigers, aptly captures the feline elegance, intensity and sharpness of her own style; but feral animals were then also a part of her interior world, appearing in dreams and intruding into her waking life as fevered manifestations of her unconscious. In ‘The Pangolin’ she asks: ‘Why do I dream of such large, hot-blooded beasts / covered with sweating fur and full of passions?’ (Poems, 32). In ‘I Ride on My High Bicycle', by contrast, the surreal vision of an animal in the landscape appears as a seamless fusion of dream with reality.