Late-blooming poet Virginia H. Adair dies

0 Comments | Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Sep 20, 2004

CLAREMONT, Calif. (AP) -- Poet Virginia Hamilton Adair, who published her first collection of verse to wide acclaim at the age of 83 after years of writing in private, has died. She was 91.

Adair, who had taught English at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, died Thursday in Claremont.

She produced three volumes in all, but her first, "Ants on the Melon," caused the biggest stir. After glowing reviews in The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and Time magazine, the book sold 70,000 copies, an enormous amount for the genre, said her daughter Katharine Adair Waugh.

"She has arrived in our world like a comet," poet Galway Kinnell remarked after reading her work.