Obituary: Adrian Fox (1961-2026)

Adrian was born in Kent, England, his family moving to Belfast in 1967. He studied under the renowned Ulster poet James Simmons and his poetry has been translated into Hungarian, Philippino and Indonesian.

With a Masters degree in writing from Lancaster, his work was published by Poetry Ireland, Cyphers, Honest Ulsterman, Black Mountain Review, Poetry Guild, Poetry Society and Coffee House among other significant outlets. A selection of his work appeared in the anthology Breaking the Skin (Black Mountain Press, 2002), and in 1999, Lapwing Press published his collection Hide Dada, Hide, which announced a new voice in the poetry community.

With the folk singer Rodney Cordner, he created the CD Violets based on the book ‘Lost Lives’, which lists every person killed during the Northern Ireland Troubles. ‘Violets’ is an anagram of ‘Lost Lives’ and the intensely imagined sequence of poems and music is available online.

Adrian was very active as a one-person hub for poetry in the north Armagh area, running open mic sessions and offering creative writing courses and classes, while publishing his own work. Around 2005, a stroke radically changed his life at a young age. As a survivor, he began slowly to create a new body of work, assembling ideas and expressions which described the challenges of memory and movement and mood, reclaiming aspects of his life as an English child in Belfast, always ‘a boy from elsewhere’.

His poems were for many among the first messages from a world post-trauma – it was possible to survive, it was possible to go on, there was still poetry to be had.

His work reached a level of articulacy entirely his own. Poetry NI's Pen Points Press published an online collection of his work on Poetry Day Ireland 2019. The Disabled Dimension is an invaluable record of artistic achievement meeting catastrophic event.

Fox chronicles the encounter with a cold eye, and the poems – all blooms and blister-packs, plastic urinals and the ‘great organ pipes of the Ulster Hall’ – enrich our culture immeasurably.

In recent years, he was a most welcome arrival at poetry events in Belfast, sometimes to read his work, also to be warmly greeted by the very many people who held him is such high regard as a writer and a person.

Our condolences are extended to his immediate and extended family and friends.

The Da was a baby in a basket
left by a blood red door.
The first sounds he heard
were the rap on the door
and her footsteps running away.