Terry Adams
The child of newspaper editors, with roots in Cincinnati, Ohio, Terry Adams grew up in newsrooms and Catholic grammar schools. He earned an MA in Creative Writing and Literature at Miami Univeristy, Ohio. During the Vietnam War era, he became Top Secret Control Officer at the U.S. Air Force’s Strategic Air Command Headquarters, where he had the opportunity to contemplate his personal role in the destruction of civilization. He left the services as a conscientious objector in 1972.
Terry lives with his wife in La Honda, California, among the giant redwoods in Ken Kesey’s former house. For many years, he has been active in the local poetry community, including the Waverly Writers of Palo Alto, the Not Yet Dead Poet’s Society of Redwood City, and the La Honda writer’s group. His poems have appeared in Bellowoing Ark, College English, Ironwood, Poetry, The Sun, Witness, and other journals.
“Poems that etch themselves into our minds by virtue of their powerful and sometimes astonishing images, their often-risky subject matter, their angled approach, their tone of contemplation and yearning.””
“Terry Adams’s poems dazzle with their keen expressiveness and perfect lines. They do more than dazzle: they get inside you and stir the emotions by rendering his personal encounters with the living and the dying precisely, unsparingly, plainly, unmanipulatively.””
Adams Ribs
Poems by Terry Adams
The freshness of these poems flows from a passionate edginess, combined with a rich lyric range. Terry Adams is afraid of nothing. In the opening poem a father, whose dying mother didn’t kiss him because she thought she was contagious, can’t kiss his fourteen year old daughter because she is “too beautiful and vulnerable”
In these poems Adams stakes his claim to be the new American Adam, and his bona fides is an eye and ear that perceive and shape with the double perception of innocence and experience. Reading Adams’ poems is like riding with him on his Harley, “footpeg scraping sparks from the concrete….”
