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    The Land Ballot
    Unavailable
    The Land Ballot
    Unavailable
    The Land Ballot
    Ebook124 pages47 minutes

    The Land Ballot

    By Fleur Adcock

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    A land ballot was the means by which Fleur Adcock's grandparents, immigrants from Manchester during World War I, were able to bid for a piece of native bush on the slopes of Mount Pirongia in the North Island of New Zealand. Their task was to turn this unpromising acreage into a dairy farm. When things didn't work out as they had hoped much of the responsibility for running the farm and engineering their eventual escape fell on their teenage son, Adcock's father. This sequence of poems follows the course of their efforts and builds up a portrait of a small, isolated community.


    "In a compelling mix of fact, conjecture and imagination, she recreates one of the most fascinating and strange periods of our colonial history: small isolated communities establishing determined pockets of Europeanness in an alien environment" - Sarah Quigley, New Zealand Listener

    "Informality and immediacy are vivid ways to remake a world; and Adcock's style has not dated in the half-century since her debut" - Fiona Sampson, Guardian

    "Fleur Adcock is as clear-eyed as always in a collection that ranges widely over lost worlds, family histories...but always maintains the art of seemingly artless observation" - Adam Newey, Guardian


    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloodaxe Books
    Release dateFeb 25, 2015
    ISBN9781780371610
    Unavailable
    The Land Ballot
    Author

    Fleur Adcock

    Born in New Zealand in 1934, Fleur Adcock spent the war years in England, returning with her family to New Zealand in 1947. She emigrated to Britain in 1963, working as a librarian in London until 1979. In 1977-78 she was writer-in-residence at Charlotte Mason College of Education, Ambleside. She was Northern Arts Literary Fellow in 1979-81, living in Newcastle, becoming a freelance writer after her return to London. She received an OBE in 1996, and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2006 for Poems 1960-2000 (Bloodaxe Books, 2000). Fleur Adcock published three pamphlets with Bloodaxe: Below Loughrigg (1979), Hotspur (1986) and Meeting the Comet (1988), as well as her translations of medieval Latin lyrics, The Virgin & the Nightingale (1983). She also published two translations of Romanian poets with Oxford University Press, Orient Express by Grete Tartler (1989) and Letters from Darkness by Daniela Crasnaru (1994). All her other collections were published by Oxford University Press until they shut down their poetry list in 1999, after which Bloodaxe published her collected poems Poems 1960-2000 (2000), followed by Dragon Talk (2010), Glass Wings (2013), The Land Ballot (2015) and Hoard (2017). The Mermaid's Purse is due from Bloodaxe in 2021. Poems 1960-2000 and Hoard are Poetry Book Society Special Commendations while Glass Wings is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. In October 2019 Fleur Adcock was presented with the New Zealand Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry 2019 by the Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern.

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