Ants on the Melon: A Collection of Poems by Virginia Hamilton Adair (review)

274 Western American Literature Schoenberg’s musical theories, “neither tonic/ nor dominant [that] may signal discord/ or foreshadow a new movement”; to Orpheus retold, “head still singing as if to stop the stones.” By re-knowing and re-singing in “the immensity of time/ in the cycles of the earth,” suggests Hearle, we ourselves become the ves­ sels for change. DEBORAH CLIFFORD GESSAMAN Smithfield, Utah Ants on the Melon: A Collection of Poems. By Virginia Hamilton Adair. (New York: Random House, 1996. 158 pages, $21.00.) Though the title might suggest a lighthearted picnic, the poems here are edgy, spare, and surprising. The omnipotent perspective in the title poem con­ jures not picnic remains, but rather the chaos of an over-populated “Formicopolis,” where “the subway of the ants” raise and bob a melon rind in assured bacchanalian doom. The poems, representative of more than sixty years of writing, are as informed in sound and substance by William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, as by Adair’s life and unique circumstances, which include the sudden and unexplained suicide of her late husband in 1968. Adair tempers the outrage of personal loss, time, history, and culture with understated lines, occasionally bold use of sound (“monkey’s fandango”), color, and dark humor. The delicious sensuality in “Peeling an Orange” is heightened by the incidental intimacy it portrays, yet its sentimentality is undercut four poems later in another seemingly private, “ordinary” moment, “One Ordinary Evening,” in which Adair recounts her husband’s death. The joyous sounds found early in the collection are tempered in the later sections by the silent “cof­ fin of the child,” a violin which serves as a constant reminder to the poet of her father’s disappointment, disappointment which reverberates throughout the col­ lection (“Strings”). Adair achieves a similar sentimental undercut with her juxtaposition of color; the dour black sleeves of grandmothers in mourning (“The Grandmothers”) give way to a cacophony of “brilliant wings,” and, as the writer moves west from Virginia, her canvas begins to include the vivid brightness of “bougainvillaea,” “the blue-mauve insomnia of the sea,” the haunting contrast of “two crows jab[bing] at a fallen orange” as she looks down at the ground from an attic window after her husband’s suicide (“Coronach”). Adair explores the internecine “ecstasy/ of slow descent through failures and desires” (“Drowned Girl”), and she insists that we all “[F]ace the drowned girl,” even with our hands full of life, “fingers thieving/ bright apples from their counterpoint of leaves,” as she, and we, listen for “the saline melody” and the “last white cord.” Reviews 275 Ants on the Melon strives, in each of its six parts, to unveil a fullness of dream, experience, delight, and disappointment. The final poem, “Take My Hand, Anna K.,” likens creativity and the blindness Adair now faces with the brilliant “roar of light” shared with Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina as she surrenders herself to the “wheels of Time.” The vision is as stark as it is irreversible. We are much enriched by the amplitude of this collection. JODI VARON Eastern Oregon State College Buying A Cabin: The Big Bear Poems. By Rafael Zepeda and Gerald Locklin. (South San Francisco, California: Minotaur Press, 1994. 35 pages, $6.00.) Years ago, upon seeing a collection of my poems in print, my first wife informed me that, “These aren’t poems, they’re stories.” I didn’t argue with her. I’ll take a good story any day. And so it is with this narrative sequence of twen­ ty-eight poems. This collection is about the fifth collaboration between these two long-time friends. Gerald and Ray live in Long Beach, California. On occasion they ven­ ture far from home and live to write about it. In this sequence, Gerald is not “Toad” but “Bear,” a moniker that harkens back to his very first book, Sunset Beach, 1967. Big Bear is a well-known high mountain valley about two hours east of Los Angeles, with a natural lake that has been augmented by our friends in the Army Corps of Engineers (or was it the Bureau of Reclamation?). Bears were prominent there as late as...