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In each magazine we invite a guest author to select her favourite poems and stories from hundreds submitted to Mslexia. Read two of Fleur Adcock's selections, plus an extract from her Essay. You can also browse previous New Writing topics. • How to submit to New Writing |
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Guest Editor FLEUR ADCOCK introduces her pick of poetry and prose on the theme of Zoo. This is exactly my kind of subject. I’ve recently come back from New Zealand, where I visited two zoos, two wildlife reserves and an albatross sanctuary. I’m fascinated by living creatures of all kinds and also by how they feature in literature – I very much enjoyed co-editing The Oxford Book of Creatures. Looking back at my own poems, I find that among other species I’ve written about slugs, tadpoles, toads, cattle, a three-toed sloth, a pangolin, and birds of every size from the wren to the moa. In some of these cases I was simply entranced by the appearance or behaviour of these creatures, or found myself trying to imagine being one of them, but in others they occurred as adjuncts to human activities: my teenage father milking cows, or my child being attacked by a seagull. There are many ways of interpreting the hospitable and elastic word ‘zoo.’ Some of the authors I have chosen went in for straightforward treatments, but others showed considerable ingenuity in adapting or extending the idea. Some focused on just one kind of animal; others offered us either an actual or a metaphorical zoo. Altogether the range was rich and imaginative; it was frustrating not to be able to include more examples. For the complete essay, and for Fleurs's full selection of poetry and prose on the theme of Gloves, read issue 37• Subscribe! |
 Read a story & poem chosen by Fleur Adcock From the Coltswolds to the Andes by Cheryl Palin The tower menagerie speaks by Emma Harding  |
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