'Is It Beautiful? What Does It Mean?'

Erica Light takes after her mother, the late poet Helen Pinkerton, in her thoughtfulness and generosity. She has sent me a box of books, including four collections of poems by R.L. Barth: Looking for Peace (1981), Simonides in Vietnam (1990), Small Arms Fire (1994) and Reading The Iliad (1995). None of these had I seen before, though many of the poems are familiar from other editions. Some of the non-Vietnam-related verse in the first volume is surprising. I could hear J.V. Cunningham talking in the next room, especially in the epigrams. Here is “A Brief History of Reason,” subtitled “Aquinas to the Moderns”: 

“Evil is nothing. Then, by their finesse,

Nothing is evil, and men errorless.”

 

And this is “The Jeweler,” “for the memory of Yvor Winters”:

 

“Each facet, sharp and bright,

Despite the turning hand

Immersed in the pure light,

Divides light, band from band.”

 

What treasure Erica has given me. Along with the Barth came the Melville House reissue of Chekhov’s novella My Life in the Constance Garnett translation, a brief monograph on Paul Klee by Joseph-Émile Muller, and a mint-condition first edition of Joseph Epstein's 1991 essay collection A Line Out for a Walk (a title he takes from Klee). Erica left a slip of paper in the Epstein collection at Page 268, in the middle of “Waiter, There’s a Paragraph in My Soup!” Here he writes:

 

“Anyone reading an interesting passage in a book asks, if often only subconsciously, Is what I have just read formally correct? Is it beautiful? What does it mean? Do I believe it? Along with these questions, a writer asks two others: How technically, did the author bring it off? and Is there anything here I can appropriate (why bring in a word like steal when it isn’t absolutely required) for my own writing?”

 

Erica’s gift reminds me of her mother's poem “The Gift”:

 

“I had a gift once that I then refused.

Now, when I take it, though I be accused

Of softness, cant, self-weariness at best,

Of failure, fear, neurosis, and the rest.

Still, I am here and I shall not remove.

I know my need. And this reluctant love,

This little that I have, is something true,

Sign of the unrevealed that lies in you.

Grace is the gift. To take it my concern—

Itself the only possible return.”

 

Helen’s poem can be found in Taken in Faith, (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2002) and A Journey of the Mind: Collected Poems of Helen Pinkerton 1945-2016 (Wiseblood Books, 2016).