Launching THE FEELING OF BIGNESS by Helen Parsons

When Adelaide's quasi-lockdown hit in mid-November, the launching of Helen Parsons' The Feeling of Bigness: Encountering Georgia O'Keeffe was momentarily put on hold. We were so thrilled to be able to have a rescheduled launch in early December.

Launched by Jan Owen, and Emceed by Louise Nicholas, the launch was held on the beautiful grounds of St John's church on Halifax Street, on a balmy evening befitting Helen's gorgeous poems.
We are delighted to be publishing Jan Owen's launch speech from the evening here for all to enjoy.

Text courtesy of Jan Owens, edited for clarity by Maddy Sexton

It is a joy and privilege to launch Helen's first book The Feeling of Bigness. This beautiful book had an unhurried genesis: Helen wisely took the time needed to balance and refine and polish these poems, and the result is a rich, explorative, and many-layered collection of sonnets, a plenitude of art and photography and music, invested with the power of place and nature and evocative details of O'Keefe's life and paintings.

Being a celebration of another art form, these are ekphrastic poems, but they are also biographical and autobiographical poems, a narrative sequence, a questioning and manifestation of the creative process, even a form of psychoanalysis.

As well as the receptive responses of the poet to the painter we are offered the personal reflections and associations of Helen herself, so we have a sensitive and honest examination of two psyches: a dialogue. How clearly Helen discovers O'Keeffe's feelings and thoughts, moods, hesitations, contradictions, dilemmas, doubts, moments of joy and completion. And her own. It's no surprise that Helen's daughter Annie became a psychiatrist!

In the poem 'Dissolution', Helen considers a photograph of Georgia by Alfred Stieglitz   and speaks of her as “fully present”.

Throughout these poems too the artist is indeed present, as is the poet, so we get to know two women as well as O'Keeffe's story. And such a story: of love and loss, of aspiration and struggle, of loneliness and triumph.The paintings, the moments of O'Keeffe's life and her changing relationships especially with Steiglitz, are interwoven with Helen's own memories and assessments to form the dance-like narrative.
I love the way Helen's response to the visual art or the emotional moment will often ushers music in to a poem – violin notes, a cello, the wave of an orchestra, with particular composers mentioned: Monteverdi, Bach, the Strauss last songs.

Music pervades the collection, and is one of the ways in which depth of field is achieved, that sense of distance and boundless space.

Another way of course is through the writing strategy: the back and forth between artist and writer, between the inner world and the outer world, and across time and place. So the feeling of bigness does inform this collection, a movement from the close-ups of the painting process or an erotic scene to the vast spaces of nature and the cosmos as in the poem 'Alchemy' “As she walks to the house,/ she feels herself the lake that holds the moon.” We share the journey vicariously through the summoning presence of place: New York, New Mexico, Maine, Bermuda, and of course Adelaide: the poem 'Earth' begins “I plant a pear tree in my city garden,” and ends “The green leaves wave against the western wall.”

Throughout these sonnets, the real things of the world are sensuously present, and insights and images and arresting lines leap out at you.

The poems are visually very effective; you can view each poem as a painting or photo, largely because of the closed form of the sonnet, the subject matter itself, and the use of colour and detail as in 'Crows': “Above the blue/ three crows, black fragments, flap and float/in the big air.”
The flow and stasis in the drama often reflects the mood and energy of Georgia as in the poems 'Story' and 'Stone', that questioning of the three main characters: Georgia, Steiglitz (her lover), and her rival Dorothy. Helen shares Georgia's sympathy with nature and its human parallels. What is more drily called the objective correlative, as in 'Snow', a poem about grief: “Fragile, recovering, she painted barns/ bandaged in whiteness, blanketed in snow,/ the silent shining weight a sort of comfort ...”

Helen's sympathy with human nature as well is likewise apparent from the first poem 'Breath' with its feeling of intimacy, of trust in the reader, of generosity in what is revealed; it has a balance and clarity like the lines of O'Keeffe's paintings.

The artist has found her interpreter. We are caught straight away by the original images. These are surprising yet inevitable as the best images should be according to the American poet Marvin Bell. From 'Garden': "Like a zen priest she walks in her black garb." And this: "Shame is like a stopper in her throat." And of the soft colours, blue, grey, yellow, rose, inside a shell, Helen writes “How subtle is the landscape it contains,/ as fresh and spacious as the southern plains."

There is a purity, succinctness and precision about Helen's style. I think of the tapering tip of a poised paint brush.

Her deft and relaxed handling of the sonnet form adds to the intimate tone. And her deep attentiveness to the inner and outer world and how they reflect each other is echoed in the confident natural voice and in the assurance of the phrasing: the interplay of short factual sentences and longer flowing phrases, the repetition of a word for emphasis and timing, the parallel phrases, the changing tempo. This musicality in turn is attuned to the ebb and flow of thought, to the creative process of searching out a poem. As a reader I felt and followed this flow, experiencing the immediacy of the perceptions and identifying with the presence in the poems.

I wholeheartedly agree with Diane Fahey who has called The Feeling of Bigness “a work of grace and distinction.”

Congratulations from us all, Helen, we wish you every success with your fine tribute to Georgia Keeffe.

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