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Feb 7, 2015

(Perhaps No One Will Notice Them)

and other works by Helen Adam

Perhaps No One Will Notice Them.
(Perhaps No One Will Notice Them)1
Helen Adam, whom the poet Robert Duncan once referred to as “the extraordinary nurse of enchantment” was an active participant in The San Francisco Renaissance, a literary movement contemporaneous to the Beat Generation that occurred in San Francisco during the 1950s and 60s. Born in Scotland in 1909, Adam primarily wrote supernatural ballads which tell of fatal romances, darkly sadistic sexual affairs, jealous lovers, and vengeful demons. Her collages arise from these ballads, and animate what she called her “lethal women.”
from Helen Adam’s Sweet Company by Kristin Prevallet 2
Where Are The Snows
Where Are The Snows3
But it has to be said that ultimately, Adam was not interested in human beings. She detested mankind for creating the Atom bomb, and for destroying nature. By depicting men as childlike, silly creatures who shoot out of the sea or are reduced to cowering infants, Adam makes a dramatic statement about who really holds the power. Like the Ancient Mariner, she believed that one day the creatures of the earth would emerge and take their revenge against the atrocities of mankind.”
from Helen Adam’s Sweet Company by Kristin Prevallet 4

Excerpts from some poems

from Stone-cold Gothic

I’m master of the Villa Malcontenta,
Mine are it’s gloomy towers, it’s halls of stone,
Mine are it’s willow trees forever sighing,
And here, for endless years, I lived alone,
The last inheritor of lands forsaken,
The lost prince in the palace of the bone.5

from Shallow-Water Warning

My love was walking in the sun
Beyond a golden meadow,
She led me where the ripples run,
I thought the water shallow
Reflecting only summer sky.
So light the chains that bound me,
So like a god on Earth was I
Before my darling drowned me.

Upon a flowery bed we lay,
Familiar joys exploring,
Till in her arms at earliest day,
I heard the surf rise roaring.
I saw, too late, triumphant snow
Whose splendours still astound me;
Wild glories I was doomed to know
For there my darling drowned me.6

Other sources

References

  1. Exhibited at “An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle,” organized by the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California, and curated by Michael Duncan and Christopher Wagstaff. Grey Art Gallery, New York University [↩]
  2. Helen Adam’s Sweet Company by Kristin Prevallet [↩]
  3. Exhibited at “An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle.” 16 3/4 x 13 3/4 in, The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York [↩]
  4. Prevallet [↩]
  5. from 5000 Poems Under One Roof by David Kozubei [↩]
  6. Kozubei [↩]