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Beliefs and Blasphemies: A Collection of Poems
by Virginia Adair
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Random House (1998-07-13)
ISBN: 0375500170
EAN: 9780375500176
Dewy Decimal #: 811.54
Hardcover: 109 pages
Edition: 1
Release Date: 1998-07-13
SKU: 0084045
Condition: Good
Comments: Clean and tight ex-library book.Stamps on edge of page deck/inside covers/ffep; card pocket inside covers/feps; Dust Jacket in protective mylar taped inside covers; shelf label on mylar. Excellent condition.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
Beliefs and Blasphemies exhibits the same qualities--accessibility, deep feeling, wisdom, humor, and technical brilliance--that made Virginia Hamilton Adair's first collection of poems, Ants on the Melon, into a bestseller and a literary landmark. Here Mrs. Adair devotes her attention to a single theme, religion, but in her brilliant performance the theme's variations turn out to be wide and deep--from reverence to iconoclasm, from comedy to profundity, from joy to lament. If you are looking for Hallmark platitudes or E-Z faith, look elsewhere.
In "Saving the Songs," for example, we reconsider Martin Luther's penchant for recycling barroom tunes into hymns: "Said Luther of the singing in saloons,/'Why should the devil have the choicest tunes?'" More soberly, in "The Reassem-blage," we are asked to test the extremes of the Christian version of the hereafter--"one a verdict brutal beyond imagination,/the other by most reports an eternity of boredom"--against our hearts' hopes. The conclusion? "Some myths are too terrible for our believing." "Goddesses First" muses about the primacy of female deities in many religious myths. "Choosing" uses the poet's virtual blindness to explain her celebration of the only distinction her "frail vision can discern": the literal difference between night and day. Zen temples and the chapel at a state mental hospital, animism and meditation, whores and angels--this curious, witty, and compassionate sensibility encompasses them all.
Virginia Hamilton Adair is a uniquely American poet--restless in her lyrical investigations, hopeful and honest, rigorous in her formal accomplishments, spontaneous in her emotions. Beliefs and Blasphemies will appeal to anyone who has ever thought about first things or final things--anyone who enjoys speculating about how we got here and where we're going--and it will reconfirm its author's stature as a national treasure.
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Amazon.com Review
In 1996 Virginia Hamilton Adair published her first collection, Ants on the Melon, and this tardy debut by the 83-year-old author took the poetry world by storm. In a series of concise, vigorous lyrics, she considered everything from motherhood to Hiroshima to her own glaucoma-induced blindness. Along with providing the deep satisfactions of an assured poetic voice, Adair's debut also whetted the appetite for more. And now she has obliged her readers with a follow-up, Beliefs & Blasphemies. This time around, she narrows her focus to a single issue, albeit one with (literally) infinite ramifications: religion. "Is there some cosmic lab / where the stars conspire, inventing Life? / Did the parturition of nothingness / give birth to all this glory?" she riddles in "Whodunit." The question, of course, is an old one, but Adair asks it with fresh eloquence, and puts a typically comic spin on her title. These are some of the wittier poems about eternity. In "Sermon on the Sermon," for example, Adair manages some expert mockery without ever succumbing to shallow skepticism: Let us skip for a moment the beatitudes
and get down to the refreshments. The picnic part.
Their souls were already fed; their stomachs were empty.
Elsewhere she varies her attack from light-verse flippancy to a deep, Yeatsian reverence. Indeed, Yeats's influence is apparent throughout--check out such semi-homages as "Easter 1990" and "Wings Like an Angel"--and it's hard to think of another living American writer who has so beautifully absorbed that Irish master's mixture of gravity and rigorous wit. --Bob Brandeis
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