First published in the Times Literary Supplement
The manufacturers of Dragon speech recognition software should be flattered by the title poem of Fleur Adcock’s most recent collection. “Dragon Talk” ought to describe an elderly matriarch’s sharp tongue, as Adcock later hints in a picture of her granddaughter and baby “just off to a lecture on Beowulf”. Instead, the discovery of this resource, which frees writing from fine motor skills, sparks a love affair with the program’s “phantasms” as well as its hardware: “Your microphone, kissing my lips, / inhaled my words”.
Adcock’s spirited appreciation of this new technology is in keeping with her lifelong habit of curiosity, which enlivens this largely autobiographical collection. Its longest section, “My First Twenty Years”, approximates a child’s outlook, with often hesitant descriptions of immediate circumstances. Adcock’s line of vision typically meanders through apparently straightforward, unrhymed lines, recalling inventions and fads with a mixture of clarity and awe. Meanwhile, she raises one eyebrow at the enduring innovations of her time: “case solved – I think” is her verdict on the post-1945 success of the Biro. The appended misgiving may have something to do with the fate of the less popular “Glitterwax”, which she calls “the apotheosis of modelling clay”. It is difficult to sing the praises of modern technology unreservedly, if tastes can be so unpredictable that “the world has decided to live without it”, this “plasticine of the gods.”
The challenge of Dragon Talk is, then, to adapt, just as Adcock adapts in her “First Twenty Years” to a world at war, leaving her home in New Zealand and moving from house to house in England, as she and her family are repeatedly bombed out. There is an unphased quality to Adcock’s verse, which is conversational and direct, while moving at an unhurried pace throughout. Adcock embraces technical glitches, both for their colour (her computer types “rain or ring” for “wren”) and their comic turns (it spells “doom to romance / by writing ‘flotation’ for ‘flirtation’”), though the limits of her vision perhaps approach in “A Petition”; her prayer to see beauty in Leylandii and loft extensions verges on sarcasm as she asks, “Make me a devotee of Health and Safety”.
