ELEGANT FIZZ BY A POETS' POET

By John Elson

Poetry is autobiography for some writers, transposed memories of voyages both interior and across time's span. Think of Wordsworth, seemingly cursed with total recall, or Whitman with his barbaric yawps about Brooklyn and the Union dead. Or consider Virginia Hamilton Adair, whose Ants on the Melon (Random House; 158 pages; $21) may prove to be the year's finest volume of verse.

Ants on the Melon is something of a miracle: the first book of poetry by an 83-year-old woman, sightless now from glaucoma, who resides at a retirement community in Claremont, California. But this slim volume distills a lifetime of writing. A graduate of Mount Holyoke and Radcliffe, Adair in her green years was considered a poet of promise. Thanks in part to the demands of marriage (in 1937 to the historian Douglass Adair Jr.), motherhood and teaching, she stopped publishing but kept on writing. Literary fame meant nothing; her delight was in the solitary pleasure of creation. The 87 poems in Ants on the Melon are a fraction of her oeuvre, which runs into the thousands.

Occasional verse for such magazines as the Atlantic and the New Yorker has earned Adair in recent years a coterie of fans (other poets notable among them). One dazzled critic (Eric Ormsby) has called her "the best American poet since Wallace Stevens." Adair is less gnomic than Stevens, more passionately personal; even on dark themes, her writing, like his, has the elegant fizz of brut champagne.

To judge by Ants on the Melon, Adair is a natural miniaturist. The longest verse in the collection is 52 lines, the shortest a mere seven. The poemlets are as richly terse as haiku, while themes in the longer ones reverberate like novels in cameo. Her images are tellingly precise, surprising. In "Mojave Evening," coyotes gather "And not far enough to mean fear/ only decorum/ the periscope ears of three/ no five rabbits. Waiting."

One terrible night in 1968 Douglass Adair, then a teacher at the Claremont colleges, walked into their bedroom and killed himself. His widow's agony and incomprehension, in poems reflecting lost love, all but leap from page to reader's eye. "One Ordinary Evening" revisits a moment of marital intimacy: entwined on a sofa, they listen to Wagner on the phonograph. Then:

Later that year you were dead

By your own hand Blood your blood

I have never understood I will never understand

In the spare, dying fall of that coda lies an ocean of tears--and a sensibility of genius.

--By John Elson