Volume 43, Number 9 · May 23, 1996
New Poet in Town
By Al Alvarez
Ants on the Melon
by Virginia Hamilton Adair
Random House, 158 pp., $21.00
When Jean Rhys was told that her novel Wide Sargasso Sea had won both of what were then Britain's most prestigious literary awards—the W.H. Smith prize and that of the Royal Society of Literature—her bleak reaction to the good news was that it had come too late. That was in 1966, when Rhys was seventy-six years old, and Wide Sargasso Sea was her first published work in more than a quarter of a century. But she had had five books in print before she disappeared from sight at the beginning of World War II, and that makes her positively precocious by Virginia Hamilton Adair's standards. Adair is now eighty-three and Ants on the Melon is her first collection of poems. Yet even if her book wins all the prizes it deserves she is unlikely to complain that recognition has come too late because public recognition has never been what she was after. She has written poetry all her life—she began when she was six—but only for the purest of reasons: to please herself and to make sense of her life, and also because she loves the possibilities and discipline of the art.
Review, 2581 words
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