Small, Profound Moments

When she started teaching at Boston College in 2012, English Professor Allison Adair wasn’t writing at all. “I’d just had my daughter, so I thought, Oh I couldn’t possibly, I don’t have any time—the typical excuses,” Adair recalled. Luckily, BC Associate Professor Susan Roberts insisted that Adair join her poetry-writing workshop in 2014. Adair credits the group for setting her on a path to publishing her debut poetry collection, The Clearing. The work, which came out in June and was awarded the prestigious Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, features lyrical verses capturing everything from the agony of losing a child to miscarriage to the humor of raising a daughter in a bustling city. “I had all these little images I collected over the years,” she said, “and all of those small, profound moments turned into this book.” We asked Adair about The Clearing and her writing process.

What is The Clearing about?
One of my favorite writers, Nick Ripatrazone, did a quick review, and he talked about how my book is about risk. That really resonated with me, this idea of women carrying things to safety for themselves and for other people in the face of risk. I only realized it in retrospect.

In your writing, you often draw parallels between nature and the human body. Why?
I grew up primarily in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, which was very, very rural. I was around a lot of farms and I would play outside, and there were deer in the backyard and animals everywhere. A symbiosis and connection between the human body and the Earth—that’s just a foundational truth for me. I don’t think of natural imagery in my poems as something I turn to as much as something that's an original language I speak. It’s my home language. 

You also write a lot about your daughter. How does that relationship lend itself to poetry? 
A few years ago, a writer named Laura Kasischke came to read at BC. She was one of the first writers I’ve heard read in a very casual and offbeat—yet serious and profound—way about her relationship with her son. My daughter was a baby at the time and I asked Laura, “How do you talk about your child and still write serious poems? I don’t understand.” She rejected the question and told me that kids are serious and beautiful and all the things moms are. Before that, I thought all of these stories about my life with my daughter don’t count as poems, but of course, they do. A lot of the poems about my daughter tend to be much more narrative and much simpler because she’s young and there’s often a little thing that happens. But I love them and I find them to be really true to my day-to-day experience. A lot of times, they have a metaphorical intensity to them.