'Something One Knows Is for Oneself'

“The moments in reading when one comes across something one knows is for oneself stay in the mind and are fondly recalled.”

One of those moments came to me more than ten years ago the first time I read “Red-Tailed Hawk” by Helen Pinkerton (1927-2017). I no longer remember where I found the poem, though probably was online. Poems about the natural world that don’t dabble in nature mysticism or nature worship are rare. This one starts in muted wonder and admiration, true, but with the closing couplet enters a deeper realm, one with philosophical heft. Helen notes the unseen, the invisible thermal that lifts the hawk:

“Yet it was real, the warm column of air–

Like being, unrecorded, always there.”

Soon, thanks to Cynthia Haven, I was able to write to Helen and express my gratitude for her work, and that started an exchange that was at first formal and a little stiff but soon relaxed into the easy give-and-take of friendship. Mostly we talked about family and books. I remember her excitement seven or eight years ago when she read Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, and her steadfast loyalty to her former teachers at Stanford, Yvor Winters and J.V. Cunningham. Helen died on Dec. 28, 2017 at the age of ninety.

One of her daughters, Erica Light, has shipped me a box of books from Helen’s personal library, carrying on the family tradition of generosity. Included among the gifts are three copies of the poetry journal La Fontana, one of which, from 1994, is a celebration of Edgar Bowers’ seventieth birthday. The passage quoted at the top of this post is from a prose remembrance of Bowers by the English poet Robert Wells, who goes on:

“Here was something unhoped-for actually in existence, and it felt as if some scarcely acknowledged lack was being made good.”

That’s precisely what I experienced when I discovered Helen’s work and the entrée she gave me to the rest of the Stanford School of Poets, especially Winters, Bowers, J.V. Cunningham, Janet Lewis (Winters’ widow and Helen’s close friend), Turner Cassity and Charles Gullans. Here are the books Erica sent me:       

Ford Madox Ford, Parade’s End, with Helen’s pencil annotation inside the back cover

Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Melville’s Reading (1988), with annotations

Herman Melville, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War: Civil War Poems

(Prometheus Books, 2001), with forward by James M. McPherson and heavy pencil annotations throughout

The Spring 2007 issue of the journal Renascence, with an article by John Baxter on Helen’s ekphrastic poems, “Bright Fictions”

How Words See (Occasional Works, 1988), a collection of ekphrastic poems, including one by Helen, edited by Ann Rosener

Laurel, Archaic, Rude: A Collection of Poems, presented to Yvor Winters on his retirement by the Stanford English Department in 1966. (Erica notes that Helen was its unacknowledged editor)

Doctor Johnson’s Prayers (1945), with an introduction by Elton Trueblood, a gift to Helen from, Erica tells me, her old friend Walter Martin of Chimera Books

Erica also includes, in her words, “offprints of my own two articles published while I wrote my dissertation for the University of Michigan on the Sienese painter Matteo di Giovanni di Bartolo (c.1430 - 1497). Back then, connoisseurship was still taught in history of art departments, now, not so much, I understand.”

She added paperbacks of Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women (1952) and A Woman of Means (1950) by Peter Taylor, both old favorites. Here is a passage marked by Helen in Wells’ tribute to Bowers. She writes in pencil “E.B. & Y.W.” and might have added “H.P.”:

“I admired, too, the balance of the poetry, the way that it rested within itself, the conviction of meaning at the poem’s centre extending through its structure to validate the details. It avoided the fragmentary and aspired to completeness of expression. Perhaps this was the counterpart of its paradoxical desire for complete consciousness, for the never-quite-to-be-known boundary between the human and the elemental beyond which consciousness fails. In their various ways, the poems reached out to a border where, for the living, there is nothing to do but approach, wait, and then go back. They also articulated the loneliness inherent in this elemental relation, the devaluing of other, lesser, experience, and a consequent sense of being adrift, wandering.”