A REPLY TO INTERCEPTED MAIL
(a verse-letter to W.H. Auden)
Poems by Anna Adams

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Anna Adams was one of the ten finalists in the 1977 Cheltenham Festival of Literature Poetry Competition. Her poems have appeared in P.E.N. and Arts Council Anthologies and have been broadcast on the BBC Closedown programme. In 1978 she was awarded a Yorkshire Arts bursary. She is married to the painter Norman Adams, who designed the cover of this volume.

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An extract from: A Reply To Intercepted Mail

PART ONE

Excuse this letter from a world you left
so lately, but you may have sympathy
with one who imitates the way you briefed
Lord Byron on the twentieth century
from Iceland; for my importunity
is not unique, though forty years have fled
since you accosted Byron, also dead;

but whether less or more so, who can say?
Are there degrees of deadlines? Do years lie
like leaves over the dead, in the same way
as sediment is laid down in the sea,
so you will never pierce the boundary
that time has stacked between you, never meet
and talk with Byron in Elysian street?

Or are times walls and fences all removed
by death’s great gale, till centuries collapse,
and prisioned generations who have lived
in separate enclosures, dead-end traps
in history’s maze, are loosed - to dance, perhaps-
on that great plain whose unmapped latitude
I dare not name, for fear of platitude?

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A REPLY TO INTERCEPTED MAIL
Price £1.35 per copy post free
Cover design: Norman Adams
Publication: DECEMBER 1979 (38 pages laminated paperback).