‘The Bookshop’

The reputation of the New Zealand-born poet Fleur Adcock, who died in October 2024 at the age of ninety, was founded on poems that were spare and conversational – John Greening said she wrote as plainly as she dared – but also poised, shrewd and tightly controlled. She seemed to speak, as another critic wrote, “without ceremony, free of any forcing gesture, like a private conversation filtering quietly out of a room”. But she was also, in her apparently artless and limpid way, a literary writer: her ruminations often establish a poetic pedigree and always reveal a precise emotional intelligence. Her modesty is such that it is possible to miss, too, the delicacy and skill with which these are expressed.

In “The Bookshop”, first published in the TLS in 2014, a second-hand bookseller’s becomes a metaphor for the literary life. Adcock and her friends, the poet Michael Longley and his wife, the critic Edna Longley, draw sustenance from its floors and passages even as they and their work feed its growth. The poem’s imagery of digestion and nourishment (“drifting among the levels and chambers / of its peristaltic convolutions”) is enacted grammatically in lines that wind through relative clauses, parentheses and nested adverbials so that the reader loses sight of – and interest in – the main verb (“has now … vanished”) much as one might in a passage by Sterne or Proust. But Adcock’s poem is also an elegy for this kind of shop and the absorption it encourages and makes possible. The shop is a disembodied paradise in which “they disappeared … or … I disappeared”, and which has itself now “vanished” into a poem, on a page, in a book, on a shelf, “As they do. As they do”.    

The Bookshop

That bookshop where the Longleys and I,
drifting among the levels and chambers
of its peristaltic convolutions
on the last morning of the festival,
were lured in different directions, sucked
and digested in the dreamy caverns,
until we lost sight of each other and
they disappeared – or, as it seemed to them,
I disappeared – (backtrack as we might
there was no reuniting under that roof),
has now itself, apart from its online
phantom, vanished. As they do. As they do.

FLEUR ADCOCK (2014)

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