This week’s poetry spotlight shines on the poem ‘Cross’, from Helen Parsons’ collection The Feeling of Bigness.
Post written by Polly Grant Butler
In dialogue with the modernist artworks of Georgia O’Keeffe, Helen Parsons captures the undulating landscapes and open spaces portrayed in the artist’s paintings. However, the poems can also be read as standalone reflections that evocatively express a sense of intimacy between the speaker and her subject.
In a previous post highlighting the poem ‘Blessing’, Maddy Sexton thoughtfully considered the way ‘the feeling of bigness’ is deftly evoked throughout the collection. To imply bigness, though, is to imply its opposite: a sense of smallness standing at the edge of something vast. While Georgia O’Keeffe might have seen herself as small against the land, it is clear that for Helen her legacy is great.
Oil paint on canvas
Born out of summers painting in New Mexico, O’Keeffe returns to the motif of the black cross in several of her paintings, a representation of the environment she observed in the region. In ‘Cross’, Helen appropriates this symbol.
The poem begins with the idea of repentance, an idea that is of course intrinsically linked to the cross. However, this is overturned when the speaker suggests its subject was not concerned with guilt but instead drawn to the iconography as pure form, a shape slicing through the land and pointing towards the sky.
There is a sense that O’Keeffe was a woman who rejected the urge for ‘self-flagellating’ in lieu of committing herself fully to creativity. This is bolstered by likening the paintbrush to a gun, leaving you with the reminder that art is power. If only that was a sentiment nurtured more in this country!
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