Living on Fire
A Collection of Poems
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- $3.99
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- $3.99
Publisher Description
Returning to the range, structure, and lyric quality of the national bestseller Ants on the Melon, Virginia Hamilton Adair's new collection of poetry, Living on Fire, establishes more firmly than ever this writer's literary eminence. In clear, memorable poems--about love in its many variations, about music, about the American desert, about mortality, and about her own blindness--the poet speaks to her readers with a directness distinctly American, and with feeling enhanced and deepened by technical rigor. Of young love she writes, "Their arms bound them together like timbers/for a raft and they rocked a little, as if on water." Of her blindness: "Blind to abundance when I was not blind,/I breathe one rose and hold it in my mind." Of the Mojave she recalls "long purple robes trailing down the arroyos./As the sky dims into dusk."
All the poems in Living on Fire create their own small worlds. During a long-ago trip down the Mississippi, the author recalls, "Sometimes our waterways became narrow and dim, dark mirrors/under live-oak branches hung with Spanish moss and snakes." A new love affair brings "this nighttime madness/in the backseat of a roadster." Later, she remarks with almost as much wonder as sadness, "Sightless,/I have become a stranger to my own person." Together, these poems articulate a sensibility at once distinctive and universal. Virginia Hamilton Adair has taken the specificities of her own sometimes joyous, sometimes tragic life and transformed them into powerful celebrations and elegies whose beauty and profundity will affect everyone who reads them. Even in the midst of despair, this is a poet whose work, in its sustained passion, indeed lives on fire.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Drawing on new work and work composed over the last 60 or so years, Adair has released one volume every two years, beginning with 1996's debut smash Ants on the Melon. Her last book, Beliefs and Blasphemies, centered on religious themes, and did not do nearly as well; Living on Fire returns to the multi-part, multi-subject scheme of the first. Unfortunately, the Bishop-like descriptive power and lightness that drove Ants are not much in evidence here. One poem ends "All at once it seems sad for the leaves/ never to return to their safe place along the bough." Another addresses "You, Aphrodite in ebony, seven feet tall,/ ....You are the stuff of the new world/ emerging from its racist and intemperate history,/ with song, dance, and laughter./ Do not be paraniod// about Great-Grandma's bondage;/ white grandmas, too, were slaves to this and that/ morals and manners that never hampered you,/ travelling tall to an arrogant drum beat." Of the five sections--"Generations"; "Notes and Noises"; "The Fluted Shell"; "Mindsight" (dealing with the poet's recent blindness); "Sand Gardens"--all contain rhymed poems in traditional forms, and are infused with the wit and play of a sophisticated sensibility that can also, as in Beliefs, be nondidactically religious. It's not enough to carry the collection, but it does provide some genuinely affecting moments, as in "Cloud of Unseeing": "sometimes shapes reappear/ like the pair of scissors, not long ago,/ or a whole scenario, as in the old days/ before the shapes and colors ended/ and my fingers became puzzling parts/ of a creature I can barely imagine."
