title: The Helen Poems
author:  Victor Depta 
description: The poems in this new collection trace the poet's relationship with his daughter, whom he brought up alone following a divorce. The book's four parts, arranged chronologically, record the joys, fears, doubts, and challenges of a male parent raising a female child. In a voice that is honest and direct, Depta recounts the daily responsibilities--and the daily wonders--of a father: his roles as chauffeur, maid, and cook; as appreciative audience at dance recitals and band suppers and spaghetti dinners; as guide on camping trips; nervous driving instructor; and--ultimately--abandoned denizen of an empty nest. In an era of changing gender roles and complex vartiations on the traditional nuclear family, Depta's Father Moon disputes Marge Piercy's claim that the moon is always female. Commenting on an excursion he makes with his daughter and her friends to the city pool, Depta writes: like a ponderous goose/and a trailing fuzzball line of chicks/we in our glory go/honking and waddle-slow. In other poems he expresses every parent's fears for his/her child's safety, fears that range from the comic hyperbole of Babysitters (they're so like MTV/Cheese Puffs, Beef Jerky) to the commonplace hazards of winter in Worrywort, the possible complications of an appendectomy in The Operation, and the specter of assorted personal and political disasters in Rescue Her. Parts I and II follow Helen's development up until puberty. Part III and IV focus on her teenage years and include the father's attempts to deal with his daughter's developing sexual identity as well as his increasing awarteness of her separate selfhood, her otherness. Here again Depta pauses to observe the quotidian details of a parent-child relationships: the teen's unfortunate choice of reading material (from his perspective), the skirmishes over cleaning her room, the surprise of the father treated to breakfast in bed, the adult's generally fruitless efforts to elicit information about the teenager's daily experiences. In Poem Father and I Forgot That, the poet is made agonizingly aware of his daughter's growing capacity to assess his life, to judge its limitations with youth's ingenuousness. And in Sunbathing, Depta envisions his daughter as archaic Minoan/Nefertiti, thus reinforcing the mythic dimension of her identity suggested by the name Helen. Part IV develops that mythic dimension most fully in poems like Gaea's Children and Genesis II. The heart of the books's closing section, however, is the poet's turmoil over the prospect of his daughter's departure for college. In Tuition Costs the reader is reminded that one of those costs is the pain of separation. Though fearful of what he calls this aching aftermath, the poet develops a series of images that convey his acceptance of the fact of loss. In Letting Go, for instance, he depicts a father/like an open palm. Moreover, in choosing as his title for the book's final poem the words Not Only Daughter, Depta acknowledges the additional identities that lie ahead in Helen's life. That poems concludes with the poet leaf-left/forfeit of parent habit, yet electing to praise leaves brilliant and falling. Depta not only accommodates change but embraces it in this gesture of parental maturity. And yet the dense, jagged diction he uses in the book's last four poems attests to the intense warring emotions with which the poet has struggled. --Appalachian Journal, Vol 22, No 4<br /><br />Following a sharp redefinition of gender roles and expectations occurring in the 70s that affected both sexes profoundly, a few men found themselves single parents. Left to raise his daughter alone, Depta discovered a relationship collapsing the prescribed role of the aloof and part-time father. In a line by line address, Victor Depta brings with him an insistence and perseverance to confront assumed social traditions and their institutions. --Small Press Distribution Inc, No 18<br /><br />The poems in this new collection, his third, trace the poet's relationship with his daughter, whom he brought up following a divorce. The book's four parts, arranged chronologically, record the joys, fears, doubts, and challenges of a male parent raising a female child. In a voice that is honest and direct, Depta recounts the daily responsibilities, and the daily wonders, of a father: his roles as chauffeur, maid and cook; as appreciative audience at dance recitals, band suppers, and spaghetti suppers; as guide on camping trips, nervous driving instructor, and, ultimately, abandoned denizen of an empty nest. --Appalachian Journal, Vol 22, No 4
zlib_text: Helen of Troy And Other Poems
  1
  Helen of Troy And Other
  Poems
  By Sara Teasdale[American (Missouri & New York)
  Poet]
   To Marion Cummings Stanley
  
  Helen of Troy And Other Poems
  2
  Song
  You bound strong sandals on my feet,You gave me bread and wine,
  And bade me out, 'neath sun and stars,For all the world was mine.
  Oh take the sandals off my feet,You know not what you do; For all my
  world is in your arms,My sun and stars are you.
  
  Helen of Troy And Other Poems
  3
  The Rose and the Bee
  If I were a bee and you were a rose, Would you let me in when the
  gray wind blows? Would you hold your petals wide apart, Would you let
  me in to find your heart, If you were a rose?
  "If I were a rose and you were a bee, You should never go when you
  came to me, I should hold my love on my heart at last, I should close my
  leaves and keep you fast, If you were a bee."
  
  Helen of Troy And Other Poems
  4
  The Song Maker
  I made a hundred little songsThat told the joy and pain of love, And
  sang them blithely, tho' I knewN