'Loving the Past But Settled in the Living'

In 1994, the late Helen Pinkerton published Bright Fictions: Poems on Works of Art, a chapbook of twenty-seven poems about paintings, sculptures, pottery and photographs. Her publisher was the poet R.L. Barth. Helen’s ekphrastic poems are not art criticism or mere descriptions of subject matter. They are more fanciful than that and sometimes read like contemplative fables. Helen projects her imagination sympathetically into the works and their creators. One of my favorites in the series is about an artist unknown to me before first reading her poem some years ago: “On Gari Melchers’s ‘Writing’ (1905) in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.” Helen uses the first line (and the third line and the title) of Wallace Stevens’ “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm” as the poem’s epigraph: “How often did she make such quiet, one wonders, This woman writing at a covered table— Full summer light warming the roseate hues, Mauve, red, and pink of dress and cloth and room. A Wedgwood pier…