IN What Great Paintings Say, Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen adopt the strategy of giving each of their selected masterpieces a voice. What the paintings say is wonderfully informative about a host of things, from their historical context, to their form and content, to their meanings past and present. Since they speak for themselves - the clues are in the paintings - the effect is not simply to fill in relevant background but to bring out more forcefully the richness of the paintings, their familiarity and their strangeness, their vibrant life. In "Bright Fictions," her sequence of twenty-three poems on works of art, Helen Pinkerton does something similar, except that her meditations have the compression and suggestiveness of poetry. ' Moreover, the poems not only allow the art works to speak out, but also engage in dialogue with them, posing questions to individual works, testing their links with other arts and with a history of ideas.2 In "The Poetics of Ekphrasis" John Hollander distinguishes between what he calls "notional ekphrasis," which conjures "up an image, describing some things about it and ignoring a multitude of others," and "actual" ekphrasis, "in which the picture or sculpture is itself made to speak."3 Helen Pinkerton deploys this poetic tradition in both ways, but her emphasis on debate or questioning gives her sequence an exploratory feel that goes beyond the purposes of visual illustration and art appreciation.
The poems, arranged in a more or less chronological order, from depictions of early Greek sculptures to twentieth-century works by Gari Melcher and Leonard Baskin, constitute a quick survey of western civilization. Some of the poems are devotional in ways that connect them with the poet's early work, memorably celebrated, in 1967, by her teacher and mentor, poet-critic Yvor Winters: "No poet in English writes with more authority."4 Others have a social and historical or political dimension, which allies them with her series of longer poems on the American Civil War, one of which was awarded the Allen Tate Poetry Prize as the best poem published by the Sewanee Review in 1999.5 Yet this sequence has its own independent force and coherence, and although the absence of the accompanying illustrations hampers a full appreciation, the sense of an on-going dialogue justifies close attention to the collection as we have it. These "Bright Fictions" evince a high degree of technical polish and sophistication, remarkable for the experiences they evoke, the multiple voices they summon, the fresh perspectives they illuminate. They offer, as the first poem in the sequence puts it, "the entrance to a world."
The obvious question is, whose world? The obvious answer, the world of each of the individual artists whose works are surveyed, is true enough, but it fails to account for the interconnections of those works and the even stronger interconnections of the poems. From the diverse traditions in which the works and poems are rooted may be gleaned a sense of the cultural patchwork that is a defining feature of modern life, but even this doesn't go far enough. The relevant clues are available in "On an Early Cycladic Harpist (2600 - 2500 B.C.) in the J. Paul Getty Museum." This small marble statue is from the Cyclades, a group of islands near Crete. I quote the poem in full.
Oval the sweep, the motion horizontal.
The arched harp seems the entrance to a world
Where sunlight falls on singing faces, arms
Uplifted - instrumental to mused charms.
He listens. Then, singing, hears his contrapuntal
New variations on ancestral glories.
seeing is hearing, hearing touch, sometimes,
Some places. Enter where, immemorially,
Memory holds, sifting, the unlost stories.
The poem takes us into a world of visual, then aural, then tactile experience - and also a world of memory. It is significant that the harpist is presented not only as singing but also as listening. He is the conduit of divine inspiration, in touch with the "unlost stories" even as he sifts them and works his new variations. He is in touch with the immemorial, with the eternal, though he is himself located in some time and some place. For this reason he illustrates one of the central principles of Helen Pinkerton's art, what she calls (following Plato and the modern philosopher Eric Voegelin) "the 'metaxy' or in-between condition" of human consciousness. In this condition, the eternal is consistently a felt presence or dimension of the human world, but "the timeless [can never] be viewed, by us, separate from time."6 Metaxy is a delicate balancing act between the eternal and the temporal. The whole sequence of "Bright Fictions" is a sustained exploration of this in-between world.
In the second poem of the sequence, time and place begin to assume a more definite shape. "On an Early Cycladic Harpist (2500 B.C.) in the Archeological Museum in Athens," moves from a description of "A geometric form, seated, erect" to an educated guess about the tale he sings, "A hero's wrath examined, a woman's heart" - clearly the story of the destruction of Troy, the story of Achilles and Helen. At its close, the poem delivers a kind of moral on the significance of the singer's art: "Words that compose the listener's soul reflect / Right order in his own." And then, finally, a direct address to the Harpist: "You were, and are, / Small harpist, art's embodiment of art." Part of the charm of the poem is the way it re-animates the subject with the methods appropriate to poetry, taking us from the "geometric form" to that personification of singers, Homer, or one of his predecessors, his words active in the past and in the present, composing the order of his own soul and of the listener's, the harpist the "embodiment of art" because he is the meeting place of souls.
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