Adcock's first decade in England, following her arrival in January 1963, saw her striking out in crucial new directions, and, by developing new allegiances and discovering other landscapes and countries, beginning to redraw the map of her identity. Nevertheless the ‘love affair’ with England, a source of nostalgia and longing during sixteen years after the familys return to New Zealand in 1947, required radical reassessment. Had this been a running away as she later claimed? Now she realized she was a New Zealander, not just ‘someone who happened to have lived in New Zealand’ (LOW, 103); conscious that accent signals nationality, she implies her ambivalence through clandestine adjustments in ‘Immigrant':

The uneven process of relocation which exposed such assumptions about her identity and national belonging meant that initially her creative powers were drained: she says ‘the whole process of adjustment to a different culture set my writing back dismally for a time’ (B. 356).

The Eye of the Hurricane, published in New Zealand in 1964, was unavailable in England, but Adcock soon became known for her poetry, at first through meetings of the Group at Edward Lucie-Smith's house in London, where she met the Australianborn poet, Peter Porter, the BBC producer of poetry programmes, George MacBeth, and others like Martin Bell and Alan Brownjohn; then gradually on the national scene. The Group offered an entree to the larger literary milieu, providing the contacts needed for submitting her work to British magazines; it also offered her a critically responsive audience, for its workshop approach, based around the principles of close reading and a Leavisite engagement with the text, gave her the opportunity to read aloud and examine her work more closely in the light of members’ comments.

Undoubtedly, though, as Julian Stannard has pointed out, Adcock's cool, restrained style and use of classical principles were innately in tune with the Augustan ethos of post-Movement poetry with its liking for understatement, and deflation of rhetorical pretension. Her private, domestic orientation, her preoccupation with relationships and dreaming, sometimes bordering on the surreal, suited the post-war vogue for the modest and unpretentious, and the emphasis on the individual's experience which poets like Plath and Larkin had fashioned.