A Body of Work

Ants on the Melon: A Collection of Poems by Virginia Hamilton Adair. New York: Random House, 1996. 158 pages. $21.00.

Eavan Boland’s recent book of prose, Object Lessons, talks of her difficulty imagining the body of an aging woman as the subject (rather than the object) of poetry. Born in 1913, Virginia Hamilton Adair, publishing her first book at eighty-three, has a body of work that answers to Boland’s specifications—and more. Both Robert Mezey’s afterword in Ants on the Melon and the article by Alice Quinn that accompanied Adair’s recent appearance in the New Yorker explain that although this is Adair’s first book, she is by no means a newcomer as a poet. As one of the poems has it: “To be acclaimed young is heady / later on a drag” (134). Having avoided the dangers and intoxication of too much early fame, Adair nonetheless clearly has spent many years reading, thinking, and practicing her art. Not to mention living. These poems testify to a life in which the realities of everyday existence as writer, teacher, mother, wife, reader, woman in twentieth-century America—all become worthy material for poetry.