POEM OF THE WEEK

Fleur Adcock may be about to turn 90, but – as her new Collected Poems shows – she’s still writing essential work. Originally from New Zealand, since settling in England in 1963 she has become one of the most celebrated, and quietly influential, voices in

British poetry. Adcock writes with a rare lightness of touch, and a candour that’s often seen her labelled a confessional poet.

“For a Five-Year-Old” is one of her earliest poems, but its careful balancing act of light and dark – warmth on the one hand, faintly shocking, self-critical humour on the other – sets the tone for her later writing. It’s a poem about parenthood, its moral pressures, and the white lies that make the world a better place. The child’s “gentleness” is “moulded” by the kind of gentle person they imagine their mother to be. Adcock hints that transformation cuts both ways; by pretending to be a good person, you might find you’ve accidentally become one.

Tristram Fane Saunders

FOR A FIVE-YEAR-OLD

A snail is climbing up the window-sill into your room, after a night of rain.

You call me in to see, and I explain that it would be unkind to leave it there: it might crawl to the floor; we must take care that no one squashes it. You understand, and carry it outside, with careful hand, to eat a daffodil.

I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails: your gentleness is moulded still by words from me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds, from me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed your closest relatives, and who purveyed the harshest kind of truth to many another.

But that is how things are: I am your mother, and we are kind to snails.