ENTRANCE TO A WORLD: HELEN PINKERTON'S "BRIGHT FICTIONS", THE

Helen Pinkerton has said that her method in these poems is akin to the art of meditation practiced by poets and religious thinkers during the Renaissance.7 The structure is essentially tri-partite: a description of a scene (usually biblical or historical), followed by a meditative analysis of its significance, and concluding with an application to the present conditions or circumstances of the speaker. The structure works well in these poems, with the opening lines calling attention to important features in the work of art and the middle part contemplating its meaning or possible meanings or its puzzles or uncertainties. The most surprising and variable feature of the method is the one that at first glance might seem to be the most formulaic, the application or moral. The liveliness here is owing in no small measure to the highly variable and unpredictable modes of address, as the poems turn to address sometimes the artist, sometimes a figure in the painting (and by no means always the apparently central figure), sometimes one figure within to another within, and sometimes a different figure altogether, outside the painting but identified in the epigraph.

This latter method is used in the third of the three poems on medieval subjects that follow the three on works from Antiquity, "On Dieric Bouts's Virgin and Child (1460) in the California Palace of the Legion of Honor." The poem is "for Erica," the poet's daughter who, like the Virgin, is represented as holding her "newborn son" and who is addressed at the midway point. The address emphasizes the timeless contemporaneousness of the painting, highlighted too by its warm humanity as compared to the stylized Virgin and Child of the previous poem, where the human creature is "Austere and almost arrogant." The painting by Bouts focuses, by contrast, on "an intimate communion" ("His lips touch hers, his hand her breast"). But where the comparison of the Virgin and the modern mother might seem to set the stage for commonplace pieties, the address to Erica turns instead to a summary of a debate on the very nature of love, surprising in its quiet authority:

Although some say

Lust informs all love, others say grace ranges

Downward, perfecting love through all its changes.

The poem reaches for the grace implicit in the subject of the Virgin and Child, but its calm acknowledgment of the alternative possibility keeps that yearning grounded in the common experience of humanity. The alternatives are presented with an almost neutral balance - some say, others say - tipped in the latter's favor only by its more fully activated presence and the position of climax, clinched by the couplet. The most surprising and fully energized word in the poem is the perfectly placed "downward."

Of the series of poems on works from the Renaissance, "On Rembrandt's Etching of Joseph Telling His Dream (1636)" similarly stands out for its inventive application and address - and for the downward reach of grace. The central figure in the painting (as in the concluding chapters of Genesis, too) is Joseph, and the poem highlights this focus in its opening. But the conclusion of the poem turns to address Judah, a turn loaded with implication for the fate of the nation of Israel and for the spiritual mystery of grace.