Glass Wings

Fleur Adcock''s title refers to the transparent, glittering wings of some of the species -bees, mosquitoes, dragonflies -celebrated or lamented in a sequence of poems on encounters with arthropods, from the stick insects and crayfish of her native New Zealand to the clothes'' moths that infest her London house. There is an elegy for the once abundant caterpillars of her English childhood, while ot...