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Anna Adams (1926-2011) British poet born in West London who celebrates the force of nature and writes with a remarkable empathy for the natural and human worlds. Adams trained as an artist and ceramicist at Harrow Art School and Hornsey College of Art. She worked as an art teacher, casual farm laborer and pottery designer, and divides her time between Horton-in-Ribblesdale and London.
Anna Adams work distrusts both biography and the personal pronoun - a calculated and impassioned aesthetic which draws strength from the examples of the poets Elizabeth Bishop and Charles Tomlinson. She published A Journey Through Winter in 1969 and has pursued a prolific career since. Her rate of productivity is driven by a high-pressured awareness of mortality. In the very moving A Reply to Intercepted Mail (A Verse Letter to W. H. Auden) (1979), she tells how, following a sudden life-threatening illness in 1960, she 'begged for time', the medicine partly being ’poetry'. The qualities inherent in the prose of Island Chapters (1991) and Life on Limestone (1994) are her ear for the cadences of speech, precise observation, wit and compassion. These skills become even more concentrated in her poetry. She published Green Resistance: New and Selected Poems, in 1996.