Research Catalog

Title

Ants on the melon : a collection of poems / Virginia Hamilton Adair.

Author

Adair, Virginia, 1913-2004.

Publication

New York : Random House, 1996.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

x, 158 pages; 22 cm

Summary

• One of the most striking achievements of these poems is Mrs. Adair's wedding of traditional rhyme and meter with a sensibility entirely modern, American, sometimes disturbing, occasionally hilarious, always candid. The collection's title poem, "Ants on the Melon," makes a wry, microcosmic comment on overpopulation. "Surfers" draws permanent lessons from the transience of youth. "Break In" transforms a standard burglary into a moment of bitter but wise resignation.
• Other poems take as their starting point the Gulf War, Zen Buddhism, or the interstate highway system. This collection's broad subject matter, from mourning to sexual joy to the plaint of an old umbrella, is matched by its chronological range, extending from the poet's childhood - "Key Ring" and "The Grandmothers" - to her old age, which lies at the heart of such poems as "Slow Scythe" and "Take My Hand, Anna K."
• .
• Mrs. Adair's refusal to publish her first book of poetry until now, at the age of eighty-three, emphasizes the double role of Time as the hero and villain of all human lives, and Time and its rewards and wounds and mercies may be these poems' most profound concern. In his intimate and affectionate Afterword, Robert Mezey, an accomplished poet himself and Mrs.
• Adair's close friend and literary champion, discusses her reluctance about book publication, and gives us a strong sense of her character and experiences - particularly the devastating impact of her husband's suicide in 1968 and the tragedy of the blindness that struck her in the beginning of this decade. And in the poems we are privileged to make the direct acquaintance, at long last, of this brave and gifted writer.

Contents

• Key Ring -- Summary by the Pawns -- Asbury Park, 1915 -- Fordham Road, 1917 -- The Grandmothers -- Early Walk -- The Shell -- The April Lovers -- Railway Tempo -- Musical Moment -- An Hour to Dance -- Drowned Girl -- Cor Urbis -- The Dark Hole -- The Survivors -- Ants on the Melon -- Yorktown Ferry -- Buckroe, After the Season, 1942 -- By Old Maps -- Narrow Gauge -- LAX-Gatwick -- Return -- Grasmere Journal -- Americans in Bloomsbury -- English Visit -- Nocturne -- Windmill Time -- In Dublin's Fair City, 1963 -- Reunion Between Planes -- Now You Need Me -- Blackened Rings -- The Trek -- Laguna in September -- Surfers -- Winter Zendo -- Riding a Koan -- Light in Wrightwood -- Driving Westward -- Godstone -- Mojave Evening -- Abandoned Anthill -- Two of Us -- Yes, Though I Walk -- Second Coming -- Sonoran Cattle -- Withdrawal -- The Genesis Strain -- God to the Serpent -- TV Brideshead Revisited -- Cutting the Cake -- Child as Deity -- The Wedding Frame --
• Home Notes -- Pity Ulysses -- Too Small for Words -- In Nomine -- Corona Fidei -- Now We Lay Us -- Strange Frequency -- Where Did I Leave Off? -- Peeling an Orange -- Blueberry City -- By the Waters -- Firewind -- One Ordinary Evening -- Dark Lines -- The Ruin -- Exit Amor -- The Year After -- Coronach -- A Last Marriage -- Two Sides of the Coin -- Fair Warning -- Midstairs -- Return to Madison -- Red Camellias -- For Scholar-Poets R.M. and R.G.B. -- John Berryman's Winter Landscape -- Shirley -- Lorna -- Pilot -- Dover -- Slow Scythe -- Strings -- Break In -- White Darkness -- Take My Hand, Anna K.

ISBN

0679448810 (acid-free paper)

LCCN

95025977

OCLC

• 33403983
• ocm33403983

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries