09/06/98

By Tom Mayo

POETRY

Marianne Moore - octogenarian, poet and baseball lover - would have doubly appreciated a traditional baseball question as applied to fellow poet Virginia Hamilton Adair.

In the familiar baseball story, a new pitcher hits the major leagues at the beginning of the season and blazes through the starting lineup of every team he faces. But the question lingers: Once the batters have a second and third look at the Kid, will he still be able to deceive and amaze? Or will the newness simply be gone, with no talent in its place?

This was the question about 1996's new kid in the big leagues of poetry, Virginia Hamilton Adair, whose first book of poetry, Ants on the Melon, was published when she was 83 years old. Its 87 poems seemed to be drawn from most of Ms. Adair's adulthood - a life of solid, middle-class achievement, unremarkable save for the suicide of her husband, historian Douglass Adair, and her late-onset blindness.

Her poems about her life with Mr. Adair and about life after him are amazing in their honesty and forthrightness. They are almost painful to read, but they (and we) are saved by her wry sense of humor, her sensibleness and an inventiveness of image and phrase that avoids sentimentality and easy effects.

Her technical skills also are much in evidence, and they enforce the power of her accessible style.

In his review of Ants on the Melon, that fine novelist and poet and even better critic Brad Leithauser wrote, "Whether any poem or poems are better than very good . . . is a judgment requiring a further weighing and sifting and perhaps the emergence of additional work."

In poetry, range is as important as aim

Now, many people become impatient with the public's fixation on the question whether some new thing (film, CD, novel) is as good as the last, and critics seem to latch onto this obsession to quantify and rank works, sometimes at the expense of the works themselves. But Mr. Leithauser's question still strikes me as the right one to ask. Great artists - poets, no less than others - need to demonstrate their range, to show how they handle the variousness of life and that once their newness has faded, they still can deceive and amaze us.

Ms. Adair's newest book of poems, Beliefs and Blasphemies, provides at best a partial answer. It is 45 pages and 20 poems shorter than her first book, and quite a few of the new poems are two-, four- or six-line ditties. Apart from the diminished size, the poems deal with a single subject - religion - and by this choice the poet has taken an enormous risk.

Just as Zen haiku focuses our spirits on the eternal by focusing our minds on exquisitely minute details of nature, the poems in Ms. Adair's first book raised questions of being and meaning, of destiny and chance, of loss and grace, even as they focused our attention on the details of marriage and family, of a walk through Dublin or a drive across the American West. But these new poems address religion directly, and the effect is almost the same as staring directly into the sun, which is usually less edifying than studying the sun's shadows in an eclipse.

The bigger the subject, the bigger the risk

Modern poets have a real challenge when they take on religious subjects in this postmodern world. The choice seems to be between the inspirational (hard to avoid being platitudinous) and the self-referentially ironic (where terminal hipness and irrelevance lurk just around the next stanza).

Ms. Adair works both camps in her new book. In some of the poems ("So Long," "No Mercy," "Judas") she is irreverent and flip, although she never quite approaches the nasty humor of James Fenton in his "God, A Poem" ("A serious mistake in a nightie,/A grave disappointment all round/Is all that you'll get from th' Almighty,/Is all that you'll get underground.").

Others, such as "Games With Go" and "Moment," mine a more inspirational or contemplative vein and do so quite successfully. Quite a few of the works in this collection demonstrate Ms. Adair's prodigious rhyming skills, but some of the poems consist of little more.

This new book is a brave attempt in what may be a losing game. While I relish the opportunity to reread many of the poems in Ants on the Melon, very few in Beliefs and Blasphemies will draw me back into them. If Ms. Adair had taken heed of Ms. Moore's comment in a 1950 interview ("One could almost say that each striking literary work is some phase of the desire to resist or affirm religion"), her second book really might have been special.

Tom Mayo is an associate professor at Southern Methodist University's School of Law and teaches "Law, Literature & Medicine" there and at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.

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