Product Description

"        Virginia Adair speaks directly and unaffectedly, in an accent stripped of mannerism and allusion. Ants on the Melon exhibits enough formal variety, freshness, and intelligence to confirm, at one stroke, that Ms. Adair is a poet of accomplishment and originality."
--Brad Leithauser, The New York Times Book Review

"        Extraordinarily moving. Her voice is clear, assured, varied, and utterly her own."
--A. Alvarez, The New York Review of Books

"        The rhyme is ingenious, the humor saucy and unsparing, and the author clearly takes a delight in perversity, in an inversion of the expected."
--Alice Quinn, The New Yorker

"        How bright and unmuddled and unaffected and unswerving these poems are. There's such aplomb, no faking, such a true hard edge. They never miss."
--Alice Munro

"        Adair writes with a thinking heart's and a feeling mind's unusual clarity. Here is a sensual, wise, precise, amazing voice."
--Sharon Olds

Virginia Hamilton Adair is America's most widely read and respected serious poet. Ants on the Melon has already become a landmark in the nation's
literary history, and the advent of this paperback edition guarantees that her great gifts will be recognized and appreciated by an even larger audience.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #804988 in Books
• Published on: 1999-03-16
• Released on: 1999-03-16
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 8.50" h x .25" w x 5.50" l, .46 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

From Amazon.com
There is a fairy tale quality to the appearance of this book of poems by Virginia Hamilton Adair. Although she has been publishing poetry for six decades, this is the first collection from a writer who is now in her 80s and is blind due to glaucoma. But for all that she has been through (including the suicide of her husband, historian Douglass Adair, some 30 years ago), there is a modesty and wryness to her work. From "Ants on a Melon," the poem that gives this collection its name, to "The Dark Hole," which tackles Hiroshima and the atom bomb as its subject, her poems are always finely wrought and highly original.

From Library Journal
The appearance of a first collection by a poet now blind and in her 83rd year must be accounted a triumph, and it is hardly to be wondered at if the result is a little uneven. Adair, recently profiled in The New Yorker, works with equal daring in free verse and more traditional forms; her subjects include social and religious commentary, but her principal theme is ordinary experience and its resistance to facile interpretation. It is a shame that most of the poems are not dated: given the variousness of her style and the reminiscences about poets as different as William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, and May Sarton, it would have been useful to know more about her development over more than 60 years of writing. Some poems might have been excluded, but in her better poems-the memory-pictures of "The Grandmothers" or "One Ordinary Evening," the visionary topographies of "Blackened Rings" or "In Dublin's Fair City, 1963"-there is a free ingenuousness not often heard in contemporary writing. Much of Adair's work should appeal to nonspecialists as well as to poets; recommended for most collections.
Graham Christian, Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, Mass.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Expect demand for this book of poetry. (Now, there's a sentence seldom seen.) Octogenarian retired professor Adair has published many individual poems but no previous collections. The phenomenon of her witty, articulate, urbane, polished, but also immediately accessible verse coming to greater attention in her life's winter has already been noted in the popular press, and the book's contents satisfy the advance publicity's claims. Here is a crisp and riveting poem on Hiroshima--a word that sounds like "the ocean wind" spoken by voices "triumphant and horrified." Here is a simple, sensuous, tragic poem to the poet's husband, recalling a simple, sensous, tender moment shortly before his suicide, which, Adair says, "I have never understood / I will never understand." This book may well broaden the audience for poetry. Patricia Monaghan