Endicott Redux

Voices from Fairyland: Fantastical Poetry

Voices from Fairyland, edited by Theodora Goss, features the fantastical poems of Mary Coleridge (1861-1907), Charlotte Mew (1869-1928), and Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978). The book is published as part of the "Conversation Pieces" series from Aqueduct Press. (Learn more about it on Aqueduct's blog.)

I admit I'm not wild about the book's design (there are so many great drawings and paintings by Victorian women artists that could have been chosen for the cover), but I have nothing but praise for what's inside. This is a wonderful little volume, spotlighting classic poems that are too little known today, even by mythic arts aficionados, supported by excellent essays that put these writers' work into context. Aqueduct Press asked Goss to include some of her own magical poetry in the book -- an unusual but successful choice, for it shows how Goss's work (like the work of a number of other women writers in the mythic arts field) is part of an on-going conversation with women writers who came before us.

"In this book," she says, "I have chosen to focus on poems by Mary Coleridge, Charlotte Mew, and Sylvia Townsend Warner because of all the poets I could have included, they are the ones who I think have been the most unjustly neglected -- the most talented among those whose talents have gone largely unrecognized....While I was working on this anthology, a friend asked me why I was working on it rather than on a story or even a novel. I said, 'If I don't do it, who will?' It felt like an obligation toward three women writers who have influenced me deeply.

"But Coleridge, Mew, and Warner are only three examples of what I consider a broader phenomenon, the rest of the ice that must be present, under water, when we see icebergs floating on a northern sea. That underwater ice is the tradition of women writing fantastical poetry."

I look forward to reading that larger anthology one day. In the meantime, Voices of Fairyland is a treasure, and I highly recommend it.

Art credits: The first two images above are by Emma Florence Harrison (1877-1925). The last two pieces are by Eleanor Vere Boyle (1825-1916) and Jennie Harbour (early 20th century, exact dates unknown).

The Return of Joy Williams's The Changeling

There is a terrific article in the New York Times literary blog, Paper Cuts, by Dwight Garner on the triumphant and long overdue return of award-winning author Joy Williams's novel, The Changeling. The article looks at the savage drubbing the novel first received in 1978 by a reviewer who knew very little about the evocative and emotionally deep well of fairy tales and mythic fiction. (Boy, some things don't change!) It is wonderful to know that the book is finally receiving the attention it deserved, and kudos to The Fairy Tale Review  Press (and brilliant editor Kate Bernheimer) for making it available once again. (We will be posting a full review in the near future.)

The Book of Blood

          

In her terrific article on the Armless Maiden folktale, Midori used this quote from the British poet Vicki Feaver, author of a hard-hitting poem based on the Brothers Grimm verision of the tale, The Handless Maiden:

"I read a psychoanalytic interpretation by Marie Louise von Franz in her book, The Feminine in Fairytales in which she argues that the story reflects the way women cut off their own hands to live through powerful and creative men. They need to go into the forest, into nature, to live by themselves, as a way of regaining their own power. The child in the story represents the woman's creativity that only the woman herself can save."

(The quote comes from an interview in Poetry Magazine, "No More 'Mrs. Nice'.")

I didn't know Feaver's work when I read Midori's piece, and I made a note to myself to seek it out. It's taken me all this time to finally do so...and now I'm kicking myself for the long delay. If you're a fan of mythic poetry, this woman's work is simply not to be missed.

The Book of Blood, Feaver's most recent collection, is the best place to start -- although her previous book, The Handless Maiden, is also a fabulous read. (I've posted a link to the latter book's Amazon.co.uk page here, because the Amazon.com page has Feaver's collection confused with Loranne Brown's novel of the same title.)

The Book of Blood begins with a quote from Stevie Smith, which sets the tone for the pages that follow: "The human creature is alone in his carapace. Poetry is a strong way out. The passage out that she blasts is often in splinters, covered with blood…"

As Laura Helyer points out on the Poetry House website: "Feaver seems to agree that ‘the passage out’ is a necessarily bloody or messy one for women poets who look to make a space for their voice in a tradition that has largely, and often aggressively, excluded them. By this I mean much must be re-visioned and re-imagined from a woman’s point of view. Even today, it is impossible for women to be indifferent to this imbalance even if they resent being labeled ‘women poets’. This has been successfully addressed and redressed through writers such as Carol Ann Duffy and Angela Carter through the unpicking and rewriting of fairy tales, mythic imagery and the voicing of passive female subjects of often canonical paintings. It is an approach that Feaver has supported in this collection with poems such as ‘Girl in Red’, ‘The Gift’, ‘Medea’s Little Brother’, ‘The Red Cupboard’ and ‘The Fates’ as well as famously in her previous book, The Handless Maiden."

(Read Helyer's full article on Feaver's work here, which includes excerpts from Feaver's poems.)

Writing in The Guardian, Sarah Crown observes: "Like the characters in Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber - clearly a strong influence here - Feaver's unruly women are more than capable of taking aberrant pleasure in their actions. A modern-day Red Riding Hood rejoices in her 'sizzling vermilion' lipstick and 'ruby high heels,' not caring that 'Grandma said / it made me look like a tart;' Cinderella, meanwhile, loves her work, seeing herself as 'an artist of the hearth.' Feaver also lends a more sympathetic ear to the stories of mythically wicked women such as Medea (who dismembered her brother) and Blodeuwedd (the Welsh owl-goddess who conspired with her lover to murder her husband). But she does not absolve them. Feaver permits Medea, for example, to tell her side of the story, but at the same time forces us to look her crimes in the face in a retelling so violent it is almost unreadable."

Indeed, Feaver's poems can be dark, violent, sexual, brutal...much like the old fairy tales themselves. She joins a long line of women storytellers, stretching back and back through the centuries, who have used fairy tales as a metaphoric language with which to speak of the stark realities of women's lives. Her work is unflinchingly feminist, but that doesn't mean these are poems for Women Only, of course.

As fellow-poet Matthew Sweeney has said: "Vicki Feaver's poems always come back to contemporary relationships - not so much domestic as domestic gothic, where the women are sensual and murderous. These are powerfully distinctive poems, women's poems that don't shut out men."

     

Art credits: The top two pieces are H.J. Ford's illustrations for The One-Handed Girl (a variant of The Armless Maiden/Handless Maiden/Silver Hands story); the rest of the art comes from Jennie Harbour, a turn-of-the-century English fairy tale illustrator (about whom little is now known, alas).

Jeffrey Ford: The Shadow Year: A Novel

Jeffrey Ford's new novel, The Shadow Year: A Novel, contains a number of my favorite literary themes: a child's perspective of the mysterious (and often ambiguous) world of adults; the intuitive fantasy world of children; and the echo of fairy tale rites-of-passage through dark and dangerous woods. Set in the early Sixties in a small town, three siblings find themselves at the center of a series of troubling events that begin in the late days of summer, and deepen throughout the winter. The narrator's sixth grade classmate disappears, a peeping tom harasses the quiet neighborhood, and a pale man driving a long white car silently prowls the streets.

The narrator, haunted by the disappearance of his classmate, engages his older brother Jim and younger sister Mary in the task of solving the "case" of the prowler. Yet this single case quickly becomes complicated as throughout the fall and winter, more mysterious events occur: an elderly neighbor and the ice cream man go missing, the school librarian has a mental break down, the peeping tom continues to harass different houses, and the long white car with its pale driver seems to hover at the scene of each of these unexplained mishaps.

The children have their own unique and separate ways of comprehending the perplexing events around them. On a huge piece of plywood in the basement, Jim builds an alternative version of the town, complete with small effigies of neighbors, and a hearse painted white. This "Botch Town," a microcosm of the adult world above in clay and cardboard, provides a vantage point from which to study the evolving pattern of the cases as a whole. Mary possesses a quirky prophetic mathematical vision and, like a child-sized Delphic Oracle, places the effigies in the streets and yards of Botch Town hours before each of the mysterious events occurs. And the narrator, our storyteller and "profiler," writes mini-dramas about his neighbors as a way of subconsciously experiencing and empathizing with the people around him.

But the exact nature of the danger afflicting the people of Botch Town is hard to grasp. Something is lurking unseen in the shadow, casting a pall over the town as the season shifts from autumn to winter. The children, convinced that a powerful and malevolent monster has descended on their neighborhood, place themselves in harm's way as they search for clues. Refusing to share their findings with adults, the siblings close ranks and head out to confront the shadow on their own -- slipping out at night to traverse the local woods, the lake, and even the grade school's labyrinthine basements.

Ford's novel conveys the same subtle-but-palpable current of violence that one finds in traditional fairy tales, at least in the older versions of the tales. This isn't a novel about the loss of innocence, for these children, like the heroes and heroines of fairy tales, are already familiar with the perilous dark -- more so, perhaps, than the adult characters, whose lives are so filled with emotional and physical fatigue that they insulate themselves in private rituals just to function. The narrator's mother, for example, is an alcoholic who regularly spins, over the family dinner, tales of a fantasy vacation in Bermuda.

Ford's writing is wonderful, as always -- his clean, precise style evoking such a specific decade that I found myself reliving my own childhood memories (with all their ambiguities): the backyard barbecues with adults smoking and drinking while children play unattended at the edge of the woods; the Halloween bacchanals, when one went out at night with friends rather than parents and wandered far and wide; and the various trials of grade school, from gruff teachers to playground battles. The siblings are terrific -- their exchanges hilarious (Jim's wisecracks are among the best), intensely loyal, imaginative, and brave. Though eerie and haunted at times, the novel maintains its subtlety throughout -- even its climax and conclusion are muted -- placing the emphasis not on the "action" of the plot, but on the slow transformation of the children, especially the narrator, and of the life of the town itself. Don't miss this one. It's another beauty in Ford's excellent canon of novels.

Táin Bó Cúailnge

Táin Bó Cúailnge, better known as the Táin, and customarily translated as The Cattle Raid of Cooley, is the most important of the approximately eighty tales that make up the Ulster Cycle. Queen Medb of Connacht, equal to her husband Ailill in all things except for the possession of a prize bull, goes to Ulster to steal the Donn Cúailnge, the Brown Bull of Cooley, to balance the scales. The men of Ulster being laid low by the periodic curse that has come upon them, the eighteen-year-old Cú Chulainn defends the province against the army of Ireland. It is an epic tale, full of violence, treachery, daring, and feats of arms, and Ciaran Carson's new translation, The Táin, is equal to it.

Legend has it that the Táin was first written down in the seventh century, when St. Colm Cille summoned the soul of Fergus Mac Róich, one of the main protagonists of the story, from the grave. Fergus recites the entirety of the Táin to St. Ciaran of Cluain, who writes it down on the hide of his pet dun cow, thus giving the name of the manuscript, Lebor na hUidre, "The Book of the Dun Cow." As "The Book of the Dun Cow" is one of the extant manuscripts in which a partial version of the Táin is found, it is fitting that this excellent modern version is also scribed by a Ciaran. Carson's translation is fresh and powerful, successfully negotiating the variety of literary styles present in the Táin. He gives as much respect to the high poetic elements of the roscada, the shadowy episodes of verbal jousting engaged in at key points of the story, as he does to Cú Chulainn's truly astounding feats of military prowess. Above all, Carson maintains the essential Irish flavor of the story. When you finish, you know that "what you saw was a people coming together."

The Táin and the Ulster Cycle have inspired a number of exciting artistic projects. The Decemberists recorded a version in song, and Gregory Frost has written novelizations both of the Táin, and of some of the other Ulster Cycle tales in Remscela. And perhaps my favorite new version is that by Belfast writer and cartoonist Patrick Brown, who is currently creating the Ulster Cycle as a webcomic, a terrific blend of the Iron Age and the modern. His ebook translations of some of the stories are also available on his site, and I highly recommend them.

Odd and the Frost Giants

Thursday 6 March 2008 is World Book Day in the UK and Ireland. Children in those countries can exchange a book token for one of nine free books, including the latest offering by Neil Gaiman, Odd and the Frost Giants. Odd lives in Norway in the days before there were full-time Vikings. He has an infuriating smile, a valiant heart, and an ability to keep to himself that drives the other residents of his very small village mad with frustration. And then one day Odd walks into an adventure, one so marvelous that he knows "I can never tell anyone about this because they won't believe it. Because even I wouldn't believe it." But Odd faces this adventure with the same grace that he lives the rest of his life with, and finds himself on a journey, with three transfigured gods, to reclaim the city of Asgard from the Frost Giants.

Not quite as harrowing in tone as some of Gaiman's other works for younger readers, Odd and the Frost Giants is a loving reworking of Norse myth. (If you're like me, and good retellings make you want to know more about the source material, you might be interested in The Dictionary of Northern Mythology or The Norse Myths, which I first read as a child, and which made me deeply suspicious of that Loki fellow.) It is also a fairy tale, in the G. K. Chesterton sense: a story that tells us not only that dragons exist, but that they can be beaten. The Frost Giants are among the least of Odd's dragons. The cadences of the story make it perfectly suited to reading aloud, and Mark Buckingham's illustrations are delightful. Odd and the Frost Giants is currently available in the UK and Éire, and while Grafton Street is lovely in the spring, ordering from Amazon.uk is probably easier.

Happy World Book Day, everyone. What's your favorite book of the year so far...?

Kitchen Magic

I've enjoyed many books by Joanne Harris (Blackberry Wine and Coastliners spring immediately to mind), but it's her most famous novel, Chocolat, that truly stole my heart (as did the magical film that was based on it, directed by Lasse Hallström, starring Juliette Binoche, Dame Judi Dench, and the devastatingly sexy Johnny Depp). When I heard Harris had written a sequel to Chocolat, I didn't know whether to be excited or dismayed. Sequels are so often disappointing. Thus I am very pleased to report that The Lollipop Shoes is a wonderful read, every bit as good as Chocolat. And, importantly, The Lollipop Shoes is not a mere replay of the earlier novel; Harris has rich new territory to explore here, and she does so with wit and skill.

The new novel picks up the life of Vianne Rocher five years after the close of Chocolat. Harris's flamboyant heroine is now a subdued single mother of two, living in (indeed, hiding in) the Monmartre district of Paris. As before, Vianne runs a chocolaterie...but this time it's merely a shop, nothing more. She's turned her back on her kitchen magic, striving for the safety of a "normal" life ...until another witch, cloaked in glamours and dark spells, starts prying into her secrets.

"If Chocolat was milk chocolate," says Harris, "then Lollipop Shoes is seventy percent. There’s still quite a lot of humour there, but it’s quite black humour – closer in tone to Gentlemen and Players than to its predecessor.

"Chocolat was never really about chocolate -- it was about people and how they respond to concepts like pleasure, temptation, guilt and love. The chocolate was a means to an end, representing tolerance and forgiveness – as opposed to the ideal of self-denial expressed by Reynaud, the misguided priest who believes pleasure to be a fatal weakness that must be purged for the soul’s good. In Lollipop Shoes, chocolate still represents these things, but it’s also now tied in with the concept of memory and self-expression – a bit like the recipe book in Five Quarters of the Orange, which is also briefly revisited in this story."

Regarding her decision to write a sequel, Harris says: "The relationship between writer and characters is often quite a troubled one. At times it’s a kind of benign possession, with certain individuals conspiring to take over control of the plot from their hapless creator and take it wherever they want to go. In fact I wrote a story about this (it’s in Jigs & Reels), called Last Train to Dogtown, in which an author accidentally ends up in a village populated entirely by characters he has written out – Which is my way of saying that you can never be entirely sure if someone you thought was gone from your life may not suddenly return out of the blue, expecting you to drop everything you’re doing and give them your undivided attention for the next twelve months…Some stories do that. Lollipop Shoes is one of them."

The book isn't out in the U.S. yet, but you can order an English copy from Amazon.co.uk. For more information on the novel, visit Joanne Harris's website.

The Golden Dreydl by Ellen Kushner

Today is the first day of Hanukkah, so if you are looking for a special present for a 9-12 year old, we'd like to recommend Ellen Kushner's exciting adventure tale, The Golden Dreydl. The story: It is Hanukkah, and Sara, dragged to a party by her mother, finds playing with the dreydls (little spinning tops which are part of Hanukkah's festivities) boring ... that is until Tante Miriam gives her an ancient golden dreydl. During a squabble over possession of the dreydl, the television screen and the dreydl are broken, revealing the magical worlds hidden within both of them. From the broken dreydl a princess emerges who leads Sara on a mythical journey (through the smashed T.V. screen). When the princess is captured by the Demon King, Sara, aided by a Fool, must use all her cunning and courage to outwit the Demon King, rescue the princess, and return home again.

The novel is charming, fast-paced, filled with imagery and characters from Jewish folklore(including riddles! my favorite), and sparkles with Ellen's considerable humor. This edition also has lovely black and white illustrations from artist Ilene Winn-Lederer. You can find more information about the book here.

The story was first created by Ellen Kushner in collaboration with the Boston-based six-piece klezmer band Shirim as the script to a stage show. In performance, Ellen narrates her story, while the band weaves their music behind and between her narration. Since its Boston premiere in 2000, the Golden Dreydl stage show has toured the country, and continues to be available for holiday festivities.

Secret Histories: Ekaterina Sedia

Lately I have been charmed by the discovery of Ekaterina Sedia's short fiction, which has appeared in a variety of online journals. (You can find a list of them here.) So I was delighted when a review copy of her forthcoming novel, The Secret History of Moscow, showed up in the mail. And what a treat it is -- combining a wry political satire of Moscow in the 1990s with a richly imagined underworld, populated by Russia's iconic fairy tale figures -- from the smallest of the domovoi (house spirits) to the powerful Koschey the Deathless.

The novel focuses on Galina, a young woman troubled by strange visions, who is convinced that her sister Masha has been transformed into a jackdaw moments after giving birth to her son. On the other side of town, Yakov, a police detective, also witnesses a man abruptly transform into a jackdaw and fly away. All over Moscow, trees are lined with jackdaws and owls, even as the number of missing persons reports continues to grow. Galina and Yakov encounter a street painter named Fyodor, who seems to know something about it. He shows them how to look in the reflection of a door in a puddle: "Don't look at the real thing. Watch the reflection -- this is what's important." And from the dark, reflected opening, flocks of dark birds emerge from a hidden world below.

With little more than faith in the fantastic and the desire to rescue her sister from enchantment, Galina falls, like a modern day Alice, along with Yakov and Fyodor, into the dark reflections and discovers a secret world beneath Moscow. From here the story gathers steam, as well as a wonderful cast of characters: many of the familiar names of Russian folk tales, along with other human beings who throughout history have inadvertently found their way down into Moscow's eternal underworld. Interestingly, each one of these human characters was someone who once refused to capitulate in a moment of historical crisis -- as each tells their story, there is a layering effect -- suggesting the sediment beneath Moscow is made up of failed revolutions and the lost survivors of reactionary regimes.

Until now, the underworld with its fantastic denizens have worked silently to protect Russia from the worst of its historical tragedies. But someone has learned how to open the doorway between the worlds -- and suddenly the modern world of Russian gangsters and thugs has begun to corrupt the underworld, endangering the world above with newfound power stolen from the fantastic.

The secret histories of Moscow are not just those of the city and the underworld. Galina, Yakov, and Fyodor will each find something essential about their past and their families, and discover a truth about themselves, as they journey through the underworld with its deep historical and cultural roots. Sedia writes about the underworld in a magical, lyrical voice (the rusalka -- water spirits of drowned girls -- are superb), but she also writes with dry, deadpan humor about the modern Moscow above. For example, she notes that the Zaporozhet, a little car that a thug drives to avoid being noticed, is "the make that in the city folklore was often compared to a pregnant ninth-grader, since both equaled the family disgrace."

I think readers will find this novel thoroughly engaging -- whether one is new to Russian history and folklore or already well versed in both. Treat yourself -- the novel is due out in early November, but can be pre-ordered here .

Tanglewreck

Time has lost its moorings. Time tornadoes are ripping through London, depositing artifacts from centuries past and stealing people from the present.... So starts Jeanette Winterson's children's novel Tanglewreck. The story follows eleven-year-old Silver, who has been living with her selfish aunt, Mrs. Rokabye, and Mrs. Rokabye's pet rabbit Bigamist (so named for his "habits"), ever since the rest of Silver's family vanished under suspicious circumstances. Silver lives in an old and cold house called Tanglewreck, until the strange Abel Darkwater shows up looking for a missing clock called the Timekeeper, purported to control all of Time.

As Silver journeys to find the Timekeeper, she's introduced to Regalia Mason, the Chief Executive and President of Quanta, a company that controls nearly everything -- except for Time. Until, that is, Regalia invents Time Transfusions, taking Time from "useless" people who have too much and selling it to "important" people. It's up to Silver to outwit Abel and Regalia, and to save Time.

I've long been a fan of Jeanette Winterson's writing, and so I wondered what her first book for children would be like. Ultimately, there's a big adult life message in the story -- "the machine age and the computer age both promised to give mere mortals more time in their lives, but less time is what it seems we have. We are using up Time too fast, just as we are using up all the other resources of the earth" -- nevertheless it's a fun read, full of quirky characters and adventures. And there's a simpler message to hang on to, too, for (as Abel Darkwater tells Silver) "there is always time for a piece of chocolate cake, oh yes." How true.