Ants On The Melon
November 17th, 2009 | 1 Comments | Books |
After Suzannah was kind enough to respond with the name of the poet I was looking for, I went over to the library and got out Virginia Hamilton Adair‘s anthology.
She lived long, and pours it all out into intense little word paintings. She wasn’t afraid to address subjects like sex and death head-on, including a series of poems about her husband’s suicide which are very difficult to read, harder still to put down.
Besides the samples in the Times’ obituary linked above, here’s one I keep coming back to, “Slow Scythe.”
Slow scythe curving over the flowers
In yesterday’s field where you mow,
My cool feet flicked
The dew from the daisies, hours,
Hours ago! Ages and ages ago
They flicked the dew
From the yellow and snow-colored flowers you leisurely mow.
This one I would have sworn was the work of a woman approaching the end of her life looking back. But according to this interview she wrote it when she was a teenager. Go figure.
Thanks for the post. Makes me want to buy the anthology.