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Thursday 15 June 2017

Poet of the Month 040: HELENE MULLINS



Twayne Publishers US, 1970










MY MOTHER’S FINAL GESTURE



Before she left, my mother,
trying to make it easier for us,
by slow degrees erased her identity.
Shedding the meretricious ornamentations,
the perpetual hopes, the outworn new beginnings,
she covered with the tenuity of old age
her beauty, grace, the poor remains of a gaiety
hoarded against a need that might arise.
So intent was she
on divesting herself of all familiar lineaments,
she did not heed a word of what we were saying:
that we were glad she soon would be released
from the tremors of our menaced civilization,
the fears and horrors seeping through our walls.
Barely recognizable at the end,
except to us who knew her as she was,
she slipped away
with a reassuring flutter of her hands.
We watched her go toward her unknown destination,
then turned to face our own.

  
 
 


The Mirrored Walls and Other Poems 
(1970)





 

 

The following biographical statement appears on the Yale University Library website.  [It is re-posted here for information purposes only and, like the poem re-posted above, remains its author's exclusive copyright-protected intellectual property.]
 

Helene Mullins (née Gallagher), American poet and novelist, was born in New York City in 1899, and was active from the 1920s (by which time she had already married Ivan Mullins) through the 1960s. She and her sister Marie McCall collaborated on their first novel, Paulus Fy (New York: Robert M. McBride & Company) in 1924. Mullins's breakthrough as an author came when a novel, Convent Girl, and a volume of poetry, Earthbound & Other Poems, were published by Harper and Brothers in 1929.  In 1935 she was involved in a near-fatal car accident, and soon thereafter she and McCall moved to Hollywood, California, for a lengthy convalescence. Except for this period, and time spent in Washington DC during the Second World War, Mullins lived her entire life in New York City. She continued to publish poems (under the name Mullins, though she later married Linné Johnson) in journals and collected volumes until 1970.  Helene Mullins died in Manhattan in 1991.

 


Unfortunately, Mullins remains so obscure that it was impossible to find a single photograph of her to add to this post.  The only image I could find for The Mirrored Walls and Other Poems, her final volume of poetry published twenty-one years before her death, is the one posted above. 

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read a fascinating post about poet HELENE MULLINS featured on the always informative NEGLECTED BOOKS website:

 

 

http://neglectedbooks.com/?p=4345

 

 

 

 

 

 

You might also enjoy:

 

 

 
Poet of the Month 037: BERNICE KENYON

 

 

 
Poet of the Month 035: EDNA ST VINCENT MILLAY

 

 

 
Poet of the Month 002: MARIANNE MOORE

 

 

4 comments:

  1. I believe I have photographs of Helene. My grandfather was her first husband.

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  2. @ Anonymous

    Thank you for contacting me regarding your photographs of Helene Mullins.

    If you're willing to share copies of them (and I hope you are), I recommend that you contact Yale University Library and let them know that you would like to do this. I'm sure they would be happy to discuss the matter with you.

    The Yale University Library contact page can be found here:

    https://ask.library.yale.edu/

    Good luck.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you for your response. I am willing to share copies and I'll reach out to Yale about this. Ivan Mullins' life between the end of WW1 and when he moved back to Appalachia in the early 30s have always been something of a family mystery. I was quite shocked to google Helene Mullins name, her first name of which I only learned very recently, and find that his first wife was a widely published writer.

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  3. You are very welcome. I hope my response encourages you to do more research about your relative Ivan Mullins and solve the family mystery. It might also help to fill in the gaps in Helene's story. Although her work appeared in "The New Yorker," "The Atlantic Monthly" and other notable publications she remains a bit of a mystery herself.

    ReplyDelete