Living on Fire

February 28, 2000
Drawing on new work and work composed over the last 60 or so years, Adair has released one volume every two years, beginning with 1996's debut smash Ants on the Melon. Her last book, Beliefs and Blasphemies, centered on religious themes, and did not do nearly as well; Living on Fire returns to the multi-part, multi-subject scheme of the first. Unfortunately, the Bishop-like descriptive power and lightness that drove Ants are not much in evidence here. One poem ends "All at once it seems sad for the leaves/ never to return to their safe place along the bough." Another addresses "You, Aphrodite in ebony, seven feet tall,/ ....You are the stuff of the new world/ emerging from its racist and intemperate history,/ with song, dance, and laughter./ Do not be paraniod// about Great-Grandma's bondage;/ white grandmas, too, were slaves to this and that/ morals and manners that never hampered you,/ travelling tall to an arrogant drum beat." Of the five sections--"Generations"; "Notes and Noises"; "The Fluted Shell"; "Mindsight" (dealing with the poet's recent blindness); "Sand Gardens"--all contain rhymed poems in traditional forms, and are infused with the wit and play of a sophisticated sensibility that can also, as in Beliefs, be nondidactically religious. It's not enough to carry the collection, but it does provide some genuinely affecting moments, as in "Cloud of Unseeing": "sometimes shapes reappear/ like the pair of scissors, not long ago,/ or a whole scenario, as in the old days/ before the shapes and colors ended/ and my fingers became puzzling parts/ of a creature I can barely imagine."