In January 1963 Fleur Adcock arrived in London from New Zealand with her five-year-old son, Andrew. She had few prospects: a handful of poems published in literary journals in New Zealand, the possibility of a published volume, a qualification in librarianship, and a determination to make her name as a poet. In the depths of winter she found employment as a librarian, first in a polytechnic and then in the Colonial Office (later incorporated into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office). After some moving around she found and eventually bought a house in East Finchley where she settled and lives today. Within a decade she had become known as one of Britain's foremost women poets, a reputation which she has sustained ever since.

This was not, in fact, Adcock's first visit to England, but a willed return. In 1939, at the age of five, she and her younger sister Marilyn had been taken by their parents to the UK where her father had enrolled for a PhD in Psychology at Birkbeck College, University of London. Seven-and-a-half formative years were spent in the south of England during the war before the family returned to New Zealand in 1947. During this time Adcock came to think of herself as English. Departure was a shock which led her thirteen-year-old self to romanticize England as the place of her dreams, the source of her most intense feelings and passions; this perception of England as 'home’ coincided with a growing psychological estrangement from New Zealand over the next sixteen years there.

1963, therefore, defines a turning point for the twenty-nine-year- old Adcock, who by then recognized that poetry was the guiding influence in her life. Verse published subsequently is marked by the consequences of her decision to live outside New Zealand, but also to live as an outsider in England. England offered her greater opportunities but her separation from family and loved ones in New Zealand came to be experienced as a conflict of loyalties. She said in 1993: ‘everything to do with here [Britain] and New Zealand is insoluble. My life is full of these irreconcilable things.’ However the expanded horizons apparent in all her work published since 1964 suggest that the freedoms of expatriation enabled her to establish a sense of 'belonging’ in her poetry.