Epistles from the
Planet Photosynthesis
by Mary
Adams
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this Book now
In an auspicious first
book, Mary Adams has heeded Emily Dickinson’s
advice: "Tell all the truth, but tell it
slant." This poet writes about the pain of lost
love, the difficulty of communicating and the longing,
sometimes, to be anything other than human. Many poets
have tried to express this longing; few succeed as
succinctly as Adams.
In poem after poem--sonnets, sestinas, villanelles,
pantoums, blank verse--Adams demonstrates her knowledge
of traditional forms and her ability to forge beauty from
chaos and uncertainty. She has something else, too--the
courage to trust her ear as it wends through the
linguistic garden of riches and chooses just the right
bloom.
Here is part of "Epistle LXVI: Season of mists and
mellow fruitfulness":
Sin never dies: hell
too, will be equally as bright
always, and just hot enough for the constant
manufacture of verdure,
grandeur, coiffeur.
That "coiffeur" jolts us with its rightness,
its strangeness, its wit. For wit she has in abundance
and she uses it judiciously to leaven her wisdom. It
precludes self- pity but does not, somehow, banish
sentiment. Her villanelle "The Cats Cried as Evening
Came On" is a haunting description of living alone
that almost conquers, almost celebrates loneliness. Here
are the first three lines of this stunning, understated
poem:
The earth lies restless underneath my bones.
It seeps into the dusk into my house.
Sweep taut and long, dark birds, and scatter stones.
Mary Adams directs the Professional Writing Program at
Western Carolina University. Her poetry has appeared most
recently in Shenandoah and Asheville Poetry Review.
University of Central Florida
Contemporary Poetry Series
1999. 88pp. 5 ½ X 8 ½.
ISBN 0-8130-1670-3 Cloth, $19.95s
ISBN 0-8130-1672-X Paper, $10.95
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"Mary Adams' voice leaps out of these poems like a live wire. . . . Read Mary Adams for direct action, her ability to pour strong feelings into simple language." --
Charlotte Observer
"Mary Adams does what
every good poet must: makes the familiar strange and
melancholy and shot through with glints of joyousness,
and brings the strange up close. There we can see the
unexpected branchings of emotion even through the
circuits of the computer and her longing for distant
worlds. Technically skillful and marvelously attentive to
the nearly invisible, Mary Adams is one of the most
original poets I’ve read in a long time."— Rosellen
Brown
"Mary Adams transmutes her precursors—Wallace
Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery—into
something rich and strange in this splendid first book of
earthly displays and discoveries."— Edward
Hirsch
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