Epistles from the Planet Photosynthesis

by Mary Adams

These poems cover the pain of lost love, the difficulty of communicating, and the longing, sometimes, to be anything other than human. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 081301672X
• ISBN13: 9780813016726
• Release Date: March 1999
• Publisher: University Press of Florida
• Length: 88 Pages
• Weight: 0.33 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

A truly touching/erudite collection that speaks to modernity

Adams' poetry rocks! Anyone who can appreciate traditional forms and witty allusions but who also wants poetry to be to voice of the cultural moment will want to get Adams' first collection.In "For Pandemonium," for example, Adams juxtaposes, or, perhaps more appropriately, appropriates, the primal post-lapserian (Miltonic?) city with/for both an urban (industrial?) love gone wrong and the limits of poetry itself.Adams' poetry is smart and touching, often funny but always witty. I really enjoyed reading it. It is diffcult today to find a modern poet that writes both meaningful and fun poetry.

"That terror and that trust"

I recommend this one highly! It's formal without being snobbish (in fact, sometimes the form sneaks right past you, a subtlety which more poets should only be able to manage), but it has free verse too, for those of you who are fleeing in terror from any of the sneers which occasionally characterize the New Formalism. There are no sneers here. The book contains a number of love poems (not sentimental even at their most painful, though), and a number of "epistles" from the incarnate ET's of the Heaven's Gate cult (both poignant and funny), and a number of--I guess they'd be called "other poems." On a purely mundane level, this is certainly the book I'd reach for after a betrayal in love, but it's much more than that too. My personal favorites are among the "others", with my all-time favorite being "Cerberus at the SPCA." I can't think of another poet who could combine the three-headed dog guarding the way to hell with the concrete and urine of the animal shelter, and it's an incredible combination; an appropriate treatment for people who abandon or negelct their pets might be to be tied up, preferably in the animal shelter, and have this poem read to them until they understand what they've done...Cerberus surveys the ranks of the damned in hell in just the way that visitors to the shelter look upon the caged animals, before he's caged there himself; that it's in Dante-esque terza rima only adds to the power of the poem. Cerberus says "I recognize that terror and that trust." So do readers of Adams' poems.

Mary Adams is a poet of vision and extraordinary skill.

"Epistles from the Planet Photosynthesis" is masterful in its use of traditional and free verse forms. From Sapphic stanzas to sestinas, from sonnets of extraordinary beauty to a canzone whose repetitions reunite a splintered family, Mary Adams' poems demonstrate the ideal marriage of form and content. Confident and versatile, the poet is capable of heart-wrenching intensity ("What I Should Have Told You"), rare compassion, and genuine wit (see especially "Cerberus at the SPCA," a poem of humor, grace, and metrical virtuosity). Perhaps my favorite poem is one of the best villanelles of recent memory, "Queen of Grieve," in which form, image, and sound combine with unforgettable results: "She ruled a ruin, did the Queen of Grieve..." In all, a first book of singular vision and most impressive skill.