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Reviews of Books by by Mary Adams (poems)
Commandment (2009)
"I have read with great admiration and genuine enjoyment the poems in this chapbook....I will have to return to these poems now anad again to peer into their nectareous depths...Each poem is like Schrodinger's box that "contains all kittens till it's opened."
— Fred Chappell
Mary Adams’s poems are alive with prodigious skills, an uncompromising imagination, and hearts big enough to drive trucks through, or clouds.
—Thomas Lux
The bitter music of Mary Adam’s Commandment weaves through narratives and musings, loss and birds and hairdressers and a three-headed dog. Cats and dogs coexist in these poems, uneasily, much as “emptiness that thinks it is forever” coexists with “splinters of grace.”
— Sarah Lindsay
What makes Mary Adams such an exceptional poet is her ability to fuse formal elegance and profound sentiment. Few contemporary poets can match her combination of craft and feeling, which makes this new collection all the more welcome. She is a poet of the first rank.
— Ron Rash
Mary Adams has published her second book of poems, titled Commandment. The chapbook, in twenty-eight pages, displays her prodigious power of world-building.. . . It's as if Marc Chagall put a Van Gogh spin on his world."
— Asheville Citizen-Times
Epistles from the Planet Photosynthesis (1999)
"Mary Adams' voice leaps out of
these poems like a live wire. . . . Read Mary Adams
for direct action, her ability to pour strong feelings
into simple language." -- Charlotte Observer
"Mary Adams does what every good
poet must: makes the familiar strange and melancholy
and shot through with glints of joyousness, and brings
the strange up close. There we can see the unexpected
branchings of emotion even through the circuits of the
computer and her longing for distant worlds. Technically
skillful and marvelously attentive to the nearly invisible,
Mary Adams is one of the most original poets I’ve read
in a long time."— Rosellen Brown
"Mary Adams transmutes her precursors—Wallace
Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery—into something
rich and strange in this splendid first book of earthly
displays and discoveries."— Edward Hirsch
"Adams plays within traditional
form, not outside it. In her debut collection she experiments
with sonnets, blank verse, sestinas and villanelles,
and bounces graciously back and forth between expression
and humor." - Foreword Magazine
"[S]urely one of the most intriguing
of any poetry collection in the past several years.
. . . poems that leave us wide awake and listening."
- Asheville Citizen Times
"She has a command of language, waxing
with words like 'trialogue' and '“rhinoceran.' And like
the astronomer who searches for worlds beyond her own,
these poems search for a place beyond earthly experience."
- Smoky Mountain News
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