Looking Down: Fleur Adcock reaps poetic insight from the fringe

“Strangers are good for us, they help us see ourselves in unfamiliar ways. They take slightly different routes across our wearisomely footslogged home turf.”  [Adcock’s] poetry is acute, intelligent, fastidious, sceptical, often disturbingly funny. It takes a kind of aerial view of mankind and his desperate foibles.