Adcock's most recent volume, Looking Back (1997), contains twenty-four poems about her paternal ancestors inspired by discoveries made through genealogical research. Although her fascination with her ancestors first emerges in poems in The Scenic Route about her mother's family from Northern Ireland, including those who migrated to New Zealand, it was catalyzed into a search for them by her father's death in 1987. Since then she has reconstructed in prose her family history beginning with her father's life in Manchester and ending with her childhood in New Zealand and England. In verse she has invented the stories about specific ancestors, identified by name, feature or life event, and animated by her discoveries of photographs, gravestones, houses and other relics. The whole process can be seen as marking that compulsive need to define her position.

In terms of diaspora theory and of Adcock's unusual paradigm of being doubly exiled, this obsession can be read as a version of the diasporic subject's mystical search for origins due to the hunger for knowledge about and intimacy with an archaic idea of ‘home’. This imagining of original absolutes is one consequence of the white settler's reduced authenticity or authority within the nation state. Adcock's desire for ‘symbolic ancestral reconnection’ as a response to rootlessness or dislocation was renewed and strengthened in response to her father's death. By then she had already explored in verse that process of cross-cultural referencing between New Zealand and England, which according to Homi Bhabha is an ‘ambiguous movement of transit that lacks any celebratory closure’. The return to the historical past, also a return to her poetic roots through ancestral reconnection, is a similar movement of translation. It can be interpreted as a direct response to colonization, a desire to remedy the disruption and loss caused by migration, to restore continuity to the broken line of descent by reconnecting the umbilical cord with the mother country. Re-establishing these links on genealogical and ethnic grounds is made not just to 'prove her English credentials'; it represents a culmination of Adcock's lifelong project of exploring and traversing the boundaries of nation, time and space.