October
8,
2004
MHC
Newsmakers
Virginia
Hamilton Adair ’33 Newspapers throughout the country noted
the passing of alumna and esteemed poet Virginia Hamilton Adair
on September 16. According to an obituary by Margalit Fox in the
New York Times of September 18:
“Virginia Hamilton Adair, a California poet who published
her first collection, Ants on the Melon, when she was 83, died
on Thursday in Claremont, California, her daughter Katharine
Adair Waugh, said. She was 91 and lived in Claremont.
“Published by Random House in 1996, Ants
on the Melon received wide attention,
partly because of Ms. Adair’s personal story (a retired English professor,
by then blind from glaucoma, she had written poetry all her life but had published
little since the 1940s) and partly for the unaffected style and universal themes
of her work.
“The collection sold more than 28,000 copies, which her editor, Daniel
Menaker, yesterday called an ‘alpine’ figure for a volume of poetry.
“Reviewing Ants on the Melon in the New
York Times Book Review, Brad Leithauser
wrote, ‘Given how much darkness the book contains—meditations on
the atom bomb, her husband’s death, a drowned girl, the literal dark of
blindness—it casts a surprisingly bright afterglow.’”
Again, according to the Times:
“Mary Virginia Hamilton was born in the Bronx on
Feb. 28, 1913, and was raised in Montclair, N.J. She disliked
the name Mary and dropped it as soon as she left home. She
grew up surrounded by poetry. Her father, Robert Browning Hamilton,
was a serious amateur poet, and one of her earliest memories
was of him reading Alexander Pope’s ‘Iliad’ to
her in her crib. She began writing her own poems when she was six.
“Ms. Adair held a bachelor’s degree from Mount Holyoke College and
a master’s from Radcliffe and was a professor at California Polytechnic
University in Pomona for many years. In 1936, she married Douglass
Adair, who became a prominent historian. Mr. Adair committed suicide
in 1968.
“In the 1930s and 1940s, Ms. Adair published poems in the Saturday
Review,
the Atlantic and the New Republic. Though she continued to write almost
daily, the demands of motherhood, and later of an academic career, plus her distaste
for the gamesmanship of the publishing world, caused her to send out
little work for the next half-century.
“In the late 1980s, a friend, the poet Robert Mezey, encouraged Ms. Adair
to put together a manuscript of her best work. Some years later, without her
knowledge, he sent a copy to Alice Quinn, the New
Yorker’s poetry editor.
Ms. Quinn published several of the poems, along with a rapturous essay on Ms.
Adair, in the magazine’s 1995 year-end double issue. After that, Ms. Adair’s
work appeared regularly in the New Yorker and the New
York Review of Books. Though
some critics were cautious (Jonathan Galassi called her ‘a serious poet
without being an earth-shatteringly original one’), others praised it lavishly.
The poet Galway Kinnell told the New Yorker, ‘She has arrived in our world
like a comet.’”
In January1999, President Creighton presented an honorary degree
to Adair at a special ceremony in Claremont, California.
Stair Master MHC’s new Anne Pitt Heckel ’34 and
Robert Heckel Staircase Garden is a “stunning” creation,
wrote Cheryl Wilson in the September 10 edition of the Daily
Hampshire Gazette. In “Beyond Ivy: New Landscapes Greet
Returning Students at Three Area Colleges,” Wilson wrote
that “famed landscape designer Julie Moir Messervy has
designed a stunning stone staircase linking the upper and lower
campuses …. It is a graceful design, using indigenous
stone with unusual plantings that will be appreciated by garden
connoisseurs.” The article commented on the plantings chosen
by botanic garden director Ellen Shukis, noting in particular
the ground covers that “soften the hardness of the stones” and
the dwarf conifers planted between the boulders that frame the
staircase. Also featured in the article are new landscaping around
the Fine Arts Center at the University of Massachusetts and the
Yushien Spirit Garden at Amherst College, dedicated in September
2002.
Mount Holyoke Votes The September 12 voter-registration and
awareness drive sponsored by the Weissman Center for Leadership
and the Liberal Arts was reported by WFCR, the National Public
Radio affiliate for the Pioneer Valley, as well as Springfield
television stations WGGB, Channel 40, and WWLP, Channel 22. The
event was the kickoff to the Weissman Center’s fall series
The Road [Not] Taken: The Real Choices of the 2004 Presidential
Election.
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