Babson Professor/Poet Honored by W.B. Yeats Society of NY
Mary Pinard, associate professor of English at Babson College has been awarded an Honorable Mention from the W.B. Yeats Society of NY for her poem “Near Deadwood: A Day Before the Family Reunion.”
Pinard has held teaching positions at Emerson College and Wright State University and has also been a research fellow at The Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College. She is the author of numerous articles and poems. Her many writing awards reflect her literary and poetic interests.
Pinard earned a B.A. from St. Mary's College; M.A. from the University of Chicago; and a M.F.A., from Vermont College of Norwich University. She teaches poetry and literature courses in the Arts and Humanities Division.
Judging this year’s contest was Alice Quinn, executive director of The Poetry Society of America. Quinn was poetry editor for The New Yorker magazine for more than twenty years. Quinn says: “Honorable mention to ‘Near Deadwood: A Day Before the Family Reunion.’ Natural splendor is honored here with great tenderness and family feeling, and the ending is quietly forceful, impressive, and memorable.”
The W.B. Yeats Society of New York, founded on the Irish Nobel Laureate's 125th birthday, June 13, 1990, is the largest Yeats society in the U.S. and has become one of the largest and most active voluntary organizations dedicated to one literary figure.
Read “Near Deadwood: A Day Before the Family Reunion” below, and/or listen to Mary Pinard recite it by clicking here.
Circular hay bales, perfectly spaced, undarken
in dawn light just outside Interior, South Dakota,
and before this exposed spine of Badland buttes—
closest to ground, mud-dark folds of Pierre Shale
hold traceries, faint ridges of clamshells and ammonites
left 70 million years ago by a retreating inland sea.
Then the gray-green haystack hills of the Chadron
Formation, river flooding that wove this mammal
fossil frieze—alligators, titanotheres, saber-toothed
cats—lodging it under rose layers of the Brule,
26 to 32 million years here, but eroding to yellow
escarpments, near the much higher Rockyford Ash,
a ledgy crumbling rock rumpling over it all
like a slight but sure expression of doubt. Slow goings
in the later Eocene Epoch left walls that vanish an inch
each year alongside clastic dikes, slumps, so many sod
tables, caprocks and hoodoos, pebble-coated mud balls
scattered across the dry washes. My great-grandfather
came around 1870, raised 7 children: one, father
of my father, and so on, down to us, the living.
