Ants on the Melon: A Collection of Poems - Softcover

Virginia Hamilton Adair

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375752293 ISBN 13: 9780375752292

Publisher: Random House Publishing Group, 1999

Synopsis

"        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.

About this title

Review:

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 the Publisher:

"She is very, very, very good, the fine, agile turn like an arabesque on ice that blasts, lightning-like, into a ghastly abyss."
-- E. Annie Proulx

"The rhyme was ingenious, the humor saucy and unsparing, and the author clearly took a delight in perversity, in an inversion of the expected."
--The New Yorker 12/25/95

"Virginia Adair is a welcome addition to the generational hubbub. She 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."
--The New York Times Book Review 6/23/96

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0375752293
• ISBN 13: 9780375752292
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176