The Telephone Call: Fleur Adcock

This 20-slide lesson explores Fleur Adcock’s poem, ‘The Telephone Call’.

Starter activities probe students to think about their attitude to the lottery and its anthropological implications. We then learn about the life and work of Fleur Adcock before reading the poem.

Students are prompted to think about the two juxtaposing characters in the poem before delving into Adcock’s use of language, imagery, form, structure and rhyme. The significance of the poem’s 1980s context is also considered.

Key themes and sophisticated vocabulary are listed to enable students to conduct precise analysis. We also ask what the poem’s true message may be, posing a variety of interpretations.

This resource is ideal for those studying the poem as part of Cambridge IGCSE’s ‘Songs of Ourselves’, but is useful for anyone looking at the poem.

Two versions of the lesson are attached: one is a PDF to save the best aesthetics and formatting; the other is a standard PowerPoint where fonts and formatting may be lost but can easily be edited.