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ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Virginia Hamilton Adair has written thousands of poems over the years and published some in magazines, but Ants on the Melon is her first book.
Available since April, it has attracted attention in newspapers and magazines from, coast to coast and has won lavish praise. The New Yorker's Alice Quinn lauded Adair's "ingenious rhyme and saucy, unsparing humor." And in the New York Review of Books, poet A. Alvarez said, "It takes years of hard work and practice to write with such ease and simplicity and deftness. It also takes the poetic equivalent of what musicians call perfect pitch."
Virginia Adair accepts her new-found celebrity status with equanimity. She has been through a lot in her 83 years, including glaucoma, which has left her blind.
About the loss of her sight she has written, "Here in my halls of dark with silent floors, I touch in terror till I know it's yours."
 She lives in an uncomfortable room of a retirement home in Claremont, California, a state she adopted as her own after growing up in the East. She won poetry prizes as a student at Mount Holyoke and published in the Atlantic and other magazines as a young woman. But she shied away from publishing after marrying historian and author Douglas Adair and having three children.
 Nevertheless, she continued to turn out poem after poem -- rhymed and free verse -- about a wide variety of subjects, and especially about her life in this home with her children and her professor husband with whom, as is evident in her writing, she shared a remarkably loving relationship.
Then in 1968, with little warning, he shot himself. She wrote,
"In the attic dust wears your coat
a window of sky where your face ought to be. On the lawn below
two crows jab at a fallen orange
and I cry ‘Don't. Don't.'"
This and the other poems in the book were culled from the thousands Adair has written. Ants on the Melon is already in its fourth printing.
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