Virginia Adair (1913–2004)

When this lady published her first book of poems, she was eighty-three years old. It became a bestseller, selling over 70,000 copies—unheard of for that genre. That should give the rest of us hope, right? Well, probably only if we have the wit and ingenuity and candor—and the personal charm and supportive publicity—of Virginia Hamilton Adair (1913-2004).

That first book was Ants on Melon (1996), and her third and last one was Living on Fire (2000); the one reviewed here is Beliefs & Blasphemies (Random House, 1998). It is a very refreshing and unselfconscious book of religious verses. You have to hear just a few lines from some of these poems before you hear anyone talking about them.

* * * * *

Versions of Jehovah

Versions from Aramaic to Old Greek
only approximate the truth we seek.

Quoth poor Jehovah, frowning as he read,
“They’ve falsified most everything I said.”

from Saving the Songs

Said Luther of the singing in saloons,
“Why should the devil have the choicest tunes?”
He therefore, unless history is a liar,
Moved the best tunes from taproom to choir.

Judas

The devil said, “When I was tempting Jesus,
I told him I could make him rich as Croesus.
But he misjudged my power, the pious scoffer.
His televangelists took up my offer.”

from The Reassemblage [on hell — and heaven]

Now come the rewards and punishments:
one a verdict brutal beyond imagination,
the other by most reports an eternity of boredom.

But billions have lived and died by this myth,
evolved by sadists and masochists . . . .

* * * * *

Now, granted I’ve chosen some of the cheekiest lines, just to show you that this is not a traditional collection of religious verse and this is not a demure, soft-spoken lady.

But let me hasten to add that in most of her poems, she is in fact just that: a thoughtful, demure, soft-spoken lady. Apparently, after the death of her husband by suicide, when she was sixty eight, she sought a home for her spiritual insights, eventually a adopting a form of Zen. But her book is filled with her insights in Quaker, Catholic, Judaic, Taoist, Episcopalian language — perhaps we should simply say Spiritual language.

She is so sensitive to life and sensible about earth’s blessings that she imagines a spiritual life for animals, and even for the world of plants. You pick a wildflower, say a daisy, “And who will miss them from that crowded field? / Only the roots, the plants, that had to yield.” You make a salad, “And I sense / the silent scream of the avocado: / Save, oh save my splendid seed.”

One whole section of the book (consisting of ten poems) is devoted to the life and character of Yeshua: “ . . . the words of [his] blessedness will be blown / on the breath of that simple day, / around and around the world forever and ever.” This simple Jesus feels more like my brother, more like a son of Love, than that of most theologians I know about.

But there are a raft of poems that speculate quietly, tentatively on the beyond, life after life. For example, in “The Playground of the Dead,” she pictures the afterlife as a return to the happiness of childhood, “shedding [our] cares and corpses, / [our] hates and hang-ups.” Now, as one of those for whom childhood and adolescence were the unhappiest periods of my long, rich life, this image doesn’t work as well for me as it will for others. There are other images more enlightening, more comforting to me. In “The Reassemblage” [see the quote above], she ends the poems with the vision of heaven she prefers:

Oh, you arbiters of the afterlife, let the soul go on dancing,
the mind exploring, discovering,
setting forth into unending wonders of the universe,
the wilderness of words,
the vast mysteries of the human mind.

The Virginia Hamilton Adair I prefer, the one most like her earlier book, shows up in this opening of the poem, “Moment”:

On a raft tethered to the Kentucky riverbank,
a child oblivious to my companions,
I lie looking up at a density of leaves
where the golden light of the water shimmers
above me, below me, and I feel the flowing past
of Bluegrass kin from other shores and cultures
in the eternal moment.”

Now that’s the vision of childhood that I cling too, the one to which I would gladly return. Adair’s very last metaphor for the moment of passing, in the poem with which she chooses as the last in this collection, is a hand that rescues one from a blizzard and guides one to warmth and safety (from “Walking into Siberia”):

They say a stealing warmth may flow over us,
and in the last earthly dream:
a hand on our numb fingers,
a light in the cabin window,
remembered voices.

Oh that it were so. Amen.… (meer)