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Biographical Note
When suspended during my final year of high school, the principal said to me, in the presence of my mother, “You’ve wasted your four years here.” Not only were my grades below what they should have been, I’d also squandered a promising baseball career. Before I was 21, I’d dropped out of university, had abandoned a girl who loved me and was a flop as a writer.
Things began to turn around when, instead of being drafted, I joined the U.S. Army. I almost quit jump school but held on; I completed the requirements for a black belt in Karate which, back then, was exotic and aggrandizing; and in my last year I met Marilyn, the woman who would stay with me and prop me up for the next 50 odd years.
After the army, I went back to university and, out of fear of being a perpetual screw-up, got absurd grades and finished first in my small graduating class. After a stint in New York working at Chase Manhattan Bank, I completed a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin’s Industrial Relations Research Institute. It proved to be my ticket to a job at McMaster University that allowed me to work on stuff of my own choosing. Since my specialty was international and comparative, it provided me with a perfect excuse for travelling around the world several times.
During my 24 years at McMaster University, I wrote many academic articles and a few professional books, but my ambition to be a “real” writer did not wane. After early retirement in 1997, I resumed my quest for literary respectability but made little progress until the poetry muse rang my bell in 2013. At first my attempts were as dismal as those of most beginners. Starting over at the bottom was exhilarating in a way, but also damn debasing. Then acceptances began dribbling in along with many rejections. Each time I received a yes from a respectable literary magazine, I lit up.
My chapbook book entitled ‘Critical Mass’ received some good reviews but it wasn’t until I sent it to Silver Bow Publishing, where Candice James suggested I make it into a full book, that I found the publisher I had begun to think would never appear.
This book is a memoir of sorts but it is not a journalistic account. I have not hesitated to alter details, even major chunks, in pursuit of the best possible poetry. I may now have reached my level of incompetence and, if so, that’s fine. I already feel like the central character in a corny Hollywood drama and it is a great feeling. ~ Roy J. Adams
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Roy J. Adams is a semi-retired McMaster University professor of Industrial Relations who has been writing and publishing poetry seriously since about 2015. In that time he has had work published in literary magazines in Canada (e.g. The Fiddlehead, Vallum Contemporary Poetry, Feathertale, Hamilton Arts and Letters), USA (Rat’s Ass Review, Typishly.com), UK (ninemusespoetry), Australia (Ariel Chart) and Singapore (Eunoia Review). He is an associate member of the League of Canadian Poets. He has also been a columnist for The Hamilton Spectator and Rabble and has published articles in the Globe and Mail, The Star and magazines such as Our Times and The Monitor.
Critical Massis a debut poetry book by Roy J. Adams, Professor Emeritus at McMaster University, Hamil-ton, Ontario CANADA. Roy’s poetry is real, and yet there are touches of surrealism to be found: love and emotion thriving in a concrete mindscape alive with creative energy that appeals across a paradigm of literary tastes. Adams takes us along the pathways of a life well lived from childhood, through army days to true love and his academic career. It is a nostalgic walk down memory lane with the good, the bad and the ugly littering a far-flung landscape of fulfilled and broken dreams. It serves as both poetry and poetic memoir. This book and this man are ‘the real thing’. ~ Candice James, Poet Laureate Emerita, ew Westminster, BC CANADA