Distances

These twenty-three poems were written and re-rewritten and re-written within the past five years. They reflect the pull of a human life, like the relentless tide of the Hudson River, which is actually a tidal estuary flowing into and out of the sea in New York Harbor. The poems thus reflect the rhythms of life, particularly my life along the Hudson River. Paul Goodman, a poet from New York City, calls it "The Lordly Hudson." I was born along its banks in upper Manhattan, where I spent part of my growing up years. As an adult, however, I have lived in the mid-Hudson Valley. The first poem I ever wrote was what I saw out the window of a classroom overlooking the river, as it rose from the morning mist. So this is the "scenery" of the poems.
The intuitive and inspiration scene, however, is the interior landscape we all share: the life span of a human being and its clockwork events from birth to death. These turn into metaphor and images in the poems, like the spinning of the planets, the ruins of a gunpowder mill from the Civil War, the Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, a ferry boat sinking in the East River of New York, the joy of self-discovery, seeing flowers as poems, observing mentally-disabled people trapped on an island, or a beautiful Asian woman escort in a famous bar, being alone as a widow in a summer beach house, remembering the loss of my piano, and the the grief of losing my daughter Anne, inspiring me to put together these poems in her memory.
Barbara Adams has published two books of poetry, "Hapax Legomena" and "The Ordinary Living," and a book of literary criticism, "The Enemy Self: Poetry & Criticism of Laura Riding." Her memoir, "The Stone Man and the Poet" was published in 2012.She won the Robert Frost Foundation Award for Poetry (2007), and the 1999 Negative Capability Fiction Prize for a short story.
Her poems, stories and essays have been published in "The Nation," "Texas Review," "Negative Capability," "Confrontation," "Chronogram," "Rockhurst Review," "Riverwind," "Modern Poetry Studies," "Psychoanalytic Review," etc., and in anthologies by Hudson River poets, "Riverine," "WaterWrites," "A Slant of Light" and in "The Next Parish Over."
She earned the Ph.D in English at NYU, and is Professor Emerita at Pace University, NY.