LIVES OF THE POETS
AN ELOQUENT LIFE, ANNA ADAMS 1926-2011
Anna Adams, poet, painter, ceramicist, once called herself an ‘autodidact’, referring to the absence of
a conventional higher education, though she won a free place at Harrow Art School aged thirteen and
went on to study at the Hornsey College of Art. She married the painter Norman Adams and lived
physically and spiritually close to painters. With her husband she lived for a few years in the Keeper’s
flat in the Royal Academy and, when, in 2000, Adams read at the launch of the Enitharmon/Second
Light Parents anthology, a phalanx of bearded RAs appeared in support. Some years before, in Dear
Vincent (Littlewood, 1986) Adams explored the mind-set of Van Gogh basing this on his letters and
her own sharp insights into the driving force of the artist. Throughout her writing career, including her
virtuoso A Reply to Intercepted Mail (Peterloo,1980) written in rhyme royal (a seven line rhymed
stanza), she took a lead from the hard discipline of the artist’s studio and understood poetry as both
joyous expression and demanding craft, frequently using the then unfashionable ‘strict form’.
Including poetry pamphlets (the first in 1969), prose and anthologies edited for Enitharmon, Adams
published twenty books. Her selected poems, Green Resistance, appeared in 1996 (Enitharmon). Her
last collection was Time-Pockets (Fisherrow, 2011). Island Chapters (Littlewood /Arc, 1991), a
mainly prose work, bears out Vernon Scannell’s remark that Adams’ prose and poetry share ‘precision
of observation... a delicate wit and compassion allied to a robust comic sense’.
She was, as her grandfather once said of her, a ‘natural’, endowed with rich talent, a vigorous, open,
dignified personality. She appeared brisk, busy, ‘happy in her skin’ (despite a testing childhood), not
overtly repining at any unwarranted neglect of her great talent. Anne Stevenson noted that she should
be better known: ‘for her technique is masterly and her subjects fascinating... Immediacy and
intelligence are Adams chief virtues...’ Adams was also a feminist, who wrote, “Words seem like
witchcraft. Are they women’s craft? / We all speak mother tongues. / Did we invent this art / as well as
agriculture, to be told / embroidery and knitting are our province?” (Women’s Crafts in Nobodies,
Peterloo, 1990). In her poem Grief (Time Pockets) she thrusts home the harm men, including loved
ones, may do to women: “I need no longer hide my separate mind / for I am free from his bridle / and
his mistaken conception that I was his mother.”
Her interest in people was avid, her portraits delightful and piquant. They include some of her finest
writing, led by affection: “The last of our adopted fathers, now / on this green-island day, amid wild
snows / after an absence has come back for good / to lay his big, slow-moving farmer’s bones / in
Horton churchyard where schoolfellows lie / under the disappearing local names: / Bill Redmayne,
Mason Baines, Beck Heseltine” (A Burial at Horton, Trees in Sheep Country, Peterloo, 1986).
In intellectual curiosity and breadth of interest, Adams easily outstrips self-satisfied sophisticates who
have occasionally patronised her in print, relegating her to the category ‘nature poet’ (though this
epithet tells us little). Adams often lived and wrote with a foot in city and wild countryside, including
Scarp in the Outer Hebrides and Upper Ribblesdale. Her response to nature – passionately accurate
and joyous as it is – springs from her interest in all interaction. Whether the ‘stuff’ under her gaze is
‘nature’ or city places and their denizens, her response is equally sharp, rich and unpredictable.
Adams saw the need for a framework for a writer’s ideas and speculations: formal form, perhaps, or
tight control of argument. Her finest poetry flows when such discipline falls to a subliminal role and
she becomes purely eloquent, pursuing ideas with an enthusiasm and freshness which owes something
to self-education. In A Reply to Intercepted Mail, she refers to Robert Frost’s description of a word as
a ‘praise-title’. Her instinct to praise, to rejoice in the best while acknowledging the worst, is at the
heart of her poetry. A hundred magnificent passages could readily illustrate this.
Dilys Wood
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