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.

Beliefs and Blasphemies: A Collection of Poems

Literature & Fiction

Adair, Virginia

Poetry

Random House]

Returning to the range, structure, and lyric quality of the national bestseller Ants on the Melon, Virginia Hamilton Adair's new collection of poetry, Living on Fire, establishes more firmly than ever this writer's literary eminence. In clear, memorable poems--about love in its many variations, about music, about the American desert, about mortality, and about her own blindness--the poet speaks to her readers with a directness distinctly American, and with feeling enhanced and deepened by technical rigor. Of young love she writes, "Their arms bound them together like timbers/for a raft and they rocked a little, as if on water." Of her blindness: "Blind to abundance when I was not blind,/I breathe one rose and hold it in my mind." Of the Mojave she recalls "long purple robes trailing down the arroyos./As the sky dims into dusk." All the poems in Living on Fire create their own small worlds. During a long-ago trip down the Mississippi, the author recalls, "Sometimes our waterways became narrow and dim, dark mirrors/under live-oak branches hung with Spanish moss and snakes." A new love affair brings "this nighttime madness/in the backseat of a roadster." Later, she remarks with almost as much wonder as sadness, "Sightless,/I have become a stranger to my own person." Together, these poems articulate a sensibility at once distinctive and universal. Virginia Hamilton Adair has taken the specificities of her own sometimes joyous, sometimes tragic life and transformed them into powerful celebrations and elegies whose beauty and profundity will affect everyone who reads them. Even in the midst of despair, this is a poet whose work, in its sustained passion, indeed lives on fire.

Living on Fire: A Collection of Poems

Ants on the Melon: A Collection of Poems

Random House Value Publishing

Eighteenth century pastel portraits

Gifford

In the mid-1990s, Atlanta, Georgia-based portrait painter Virginia Adair traveled the world over, interviewing 43 female psychics and healers randomly chosen from 15 countries as far apart as Indonesia and Argentina. Through her interviews with women psychics of various cultures, we learn their life histories, the nature and limitations of their paranormal abilities, and their value systems. Ms. Adair seeks to understand the phenomena from a scientific point of view, citing contemporary scientists and philosophers. She wonders if the growing incidence of female paranormal power signals the start of an evolutionary leap forward.

New Daughters of the Oracle: The Return of Female Prophetic Power in Our Time

Religion & Spirituality

New Age & Spirituality

New Paradigm Books

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