Living on Fire : A Collection of Poems

Rating:
Summary: Adair is Hot in Thermal, California
Review: The third book by V. H. Adair is in the style of her first, 'Ants on the Melon'. The solar eclipse on the cover is evocative of the light verse of sheet music of the early 20th century , masking the alternative light and dark verse inside. The reader is drawn into the humorous couplings of guinea pigs, to be left viewing their corpses strewn along the street. The seduction continues in V. H. Adair's verse, and the reader is never disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: Living on fire with Virginia Hamilton Adair
Review: When I made the discovery of Mrs. Adair's poetry by her first
volume Ants on the melon, I quickly turned to her third release Living on fire, only to find the high expectations set by that first installment to be confirmed. Virginia Hamilton Adair provides a wonderful celebration of the joys and tragedies of her life. She reflects on love in its many guises, music, old age, her own blindness, the Mojave, the Mississippi (or Nature in general), the transcience of things and DGA (her late husband Douglass Graybill Adair), once again with the wonderful clarity and directness which characterized Ants on the melon.

It's difficult to pick a favourite. But I certainly loved it how she makes fun of her Victorian fellow-poet Robert Browning and composer Eric Satie (her fine humour is never absent). Especially touching are her poems about love. And I think those about her blindness are heartwrenching, as well as the more darker poems in the DGA section. Though she's wonderfully tender and funny in the joyous poems which celebrate her love for her late husband.

Virginia Hamilton Adair indeed lives on fire and by her poetry she lights fires.