The Sunday Poems

      

...Gretel would not blame him or leave
him alone there to be fattened and cooked or flattened
into a shadow against the walls of a rotten-toothed
candy hag.  Because she knew he would do the same
for her, their names were the same words and,
when whispered, sounded together like buried, like
something bad turned into something good.....

-- from "Hansel & Gretel: Home by Pebble Echoes" by Evelyn M. Perry

We have not one but five Sunday Poems for you today. They're all by Evelyn M. Perry, they're all based on fairy tales, and they're all as evocative and thought-provoking as the excerpt above. You'll find them here, in the archives of the Cortland Review website.

A literary scholar and folklorist as well as a poet, Perry's work has appeared in a wide variety of journals and collections. She has received awards for fiction writing from the North Kingstown Arts Council and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, and for poetry from the Academy of American Poets and Salt Hill. She teaches writing and literature at Framingham State College in Massachusetts.

I addition to her excellent poetry, I recommend Dr. Perry's article "Maid Marion Made Possible: Feminist Advances in Late 20th Century Re-tellings of the Robin Hood Legend for Young Adults," which appears online on the Alan Review website.

 

The illustrations for "Hansel and Gretel" and "Snow White" above are by Charles Robinson (1870-1937).

Comments

[Tigana]

http://redchap.free.fr/
Animation - Little Red Riding Hood. No spoilers!

[Midori]

Thanks for the link Tigana! Great little video.