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Reviews
“The German myths shrunken into children’s tales with the coming of Christianity might have been lost with the arrival of the modern era were it not for the methodical and comprehensive work of brothers Jacob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm (1786-1859) Grimm and the latter’s wife Dortchen Wild, source of many stories, who is rarely credited. The archetypal power of the stories, especially those with female protagonists, has induced many poets to employ their themes, motifs, and characters. This ample collection stresses the utility of the Grimm tales to women who, like Anne Sexton, Carol Ann Duffy, and Lucille Clifton, find in these “old wives’ tales” a repository of strong feminine imagery. But the figures and plots of the tales are too complex to countenance poets who would use the stories for mere polemics, and so the poets at hand include Galway Kinnell and Denise Duhamel, Randall Jarrell and Olga Broumas, Jane Yolen and Allen Tate. A strong, readable, uniformly high-quality anthology.”
— P A T R I C I A M O N A G H A N, Booklist
“The Poets' Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales, edited by Jeanne Marie Beaumont and Claudia Carlson (Story Line Press, June 2003) is a book that should be on every fairy tale lover's shelf. This wide-ranging book collects works by poets ranging from Anne Sexton, Olga Broumas, Margaret Atwood, and Lisel Mueller to Jane Yolen, Neil Gaiman, and Emma Bull. I thought I was widely read in the field of fairy tale poetry, and yet this fascinating volume contains poems and poets I've never encountered before. Beautifully edited and presented, this one's a delight.”
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T E R R I W I N D L I N G, Endicott Studio
“One of my favorite anthologies published in recent years, this collection of brilliant re-tellings of the familiar tales of enchanted woods, princesses, and stepmothers takes Grimm in all kinds of new directions, sometimes funny, sometimes disturbing, but always illuminating. Margaret Atwood, Hayden Carruth, Galway Kinnell, and Anne Sexton are just some of the literary stars represented in this collection, which includes up-and-coming and newer poets as well. Lines from Louise Glück’s haunting “Gretel in Darkness” represents the dark turns that the traditional tales can take in the poems:
Nights I turn to you to hold me
but you are not there.
Am I alone? Spies
hiss in the stillness, Hansel,
we are there still and it is real, real,
that black forest and the fire in earnest.”
These lines from Jeanne Marie Beaumont’s “Hotel Grimm” illustrate a kind of irreverent whimsy:
No one’s complaining. They get what
they’ve come for: three-night minimum,
a box of gingerbread to bring back to their kin.
Even if you don’t know Grimm’s tales by heart, these poems will still put you under their spell.”
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J E A N N I N E H A L L G A I L E Y, NewPages.com
The fairy tale, that efficiently constructed, symbol-rich narrative of seduction, sacrifice, and transformation, has long inspired as much fascination among poets as it has among children. As the editors of The Poets' Grimm point out, poems and fairy tales "share common roots of concision and communal energy derived from an oral tradition." Infinitely malleable to the imagination, fairy tales, like poems, offer the promise of the unknown within the context of universally recognized, archetypal structures.
For the 112 poets represented in this anthology, the folk tales collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm nearly two centuries ago are grist for reinterpretation, misinterpretation, social commentary, psychoanalysis, improvisation, and speculation. Rarely have they enjoyed such a degree of popularity among poets as during the latter decades of the 20th century, when the women's movement, an interest in surrealism, and a post-Romantic fascination with childhood nostalgia caused younger writers to re-examine the tales they grew up with in the light of changing adult consciousness. . . .
The Poets' Grimm—with its atmospheric forests, lamp-lit castles and mysterious spells—might recall those intimations of immortality we imagined as children hearing the original tales for the first time, enchanted with the possibility, as Lisel Mueller writes, of making "just dreams / out of our unjust lives."
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F R E D M U R A T O R I, The Manhattan Review (excerpt)
Fairies, Queens and Evil Stepmothers
“It is our intention to present the origin of poetry as a common possession of the common people, which was not separate from daily life and whose origin mortal eyes cannot see and which therefore is full of mystery like all living things.”
— The Brothers Grimm, circa 1812
(as quoted in the Introduction.)
As Polyphony is devoted in particular to the arts of narrative poetry and the dramatic monologue, this anthology falls very much within our field of interest. How do people hear fairy tales now? Or how did they ever? First, word of mouth, of course, then the printed word, then adaptations and variations? We see Walt Disney’s “Snow White,” and do not distinguish greatly between this story and another Disney adaptation, such as “Pinnochio.” Or, in my part of the world, as children, we see “Cinderella” as a Christmas Pantomime, and, the next year it might be “Robinson Crusoe” or “Dick Whittington.”
All these stories and variations, I think, become for us, as we grow up, part of a wider world of “fairy tale.” How many people would know, off-hand, where any fairy tale came from, or, indeed, whether it was, strictly speaking, a fairy tale at all? The Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Anderson? Where fairy tales end and general fiction begins seems of little importance, and in this excellent anthology we have even more variations and interpretations, this time restricted to the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. The poems are enjoyable in themselves and, at the same time, help to maintain interest and to immortalize the originals.
As the editors say: “These poems reveal the complex relationship that exists between contemporary poets and a received body of myth or lore. The Grimm tales are subject to a significant amount of skepticism, of refutation or 'talking back,' and of fracturing and breaking down….There is a mutual enrichment when poets become tale (re)tellers: the poets keep the stories current and fresh and give them back their original vivacity, rigor and immediacy, while the stories enable the poets to tap into a vast and resonant source of symbol and cultural history. The tales become again “full of mystery like all living things, released from the confines of the nursery, rescued from ossification or sentimentalization, able again to fill us with wonder, dread and delight.”
And there is wonder, dread, delight and mystery in abundance in these poems. In this substantial 260-page anthology the editors have brought together a fascinating and varied collection of poems based on, playing with, or arguing with, the fairy tales of the brothers Grimm, or which use them to reflect on something outside themselves. They rightly include poems which may be influenced by, or based on, well-known variations on the Grimm tales, such as French versions of the original German tales, or on films, cartoons and other popularizations. There are poems here from books published earlier in the century by Sara Henderson Hay, Anne Sexton, Amy Lowell, among others, and work, some of it previously unpublished, up to the beginning of the present century.
There is a surprisingly high proportion of poems by women in the anthology (one of the 10 sections in the book is entitled “The Sisters Grimm.”) and the editors say they are not surprised, as the majority of the Grimm’s informants were women. However, this does not go very far in explaining whether this present disproportion is a matter of there being a greater interest taken by women in fairy tales as subject matter for poetry (which would be interesting, if true) or something to do with selection preferences.
It is certainly true that Grimm’s Fairy Tales contain powerful female stereotypes, as well as the “prince charming” figure ( not to mention the ineffectual father) There are all those stepmothers, crones, witches, all of whom are so much more intimidating than that friendly old wolf in the forest. It may well be, as the editors speculate, that the stories resonate more with women. It is certain, for what it is worth, that it is more likely that women will have been, traditionally, the story-readers in the family.
Sara Henderson Hay writes:
“It pleases me to give a man three wishes
Then trick him into wasting every one
To set the simpering goosegirl on the throne
While the true princess weeps among the ashes.”
Dramatic monologue and narrative in general should be of interest to readers of this journal, as mentioned above, and there is a section in the anthology ”Voices and Viewpoints” which concentrates in particular on the dramatic monologue, or “persona poem” such the (to me) Plath-echoing “Babe in the Woods” by Moyra Donaldson that ends:
“By the time you came looking for me
I was all gone, daddy. Licked up and swallowed down.”
But the dramatic monologue pops up in all sections, as one would expect, and I was pleased to see Carol Ann Duffy’s “Little Red Cap” from her collection “The World’s Wife,” for instance, in the section “Desire and its Discontents.”
There is a heavy preponderance of free verse poems, as one would expect nowadays , and it might have been interesting to see rather more poems in meter, such as R.S. Gwynn’s “Snow White and the Seven Deadly Sins,” Bruce Bennet’s ”The Skeptical Prince” or Laurence Snydal’s “Grandmother”, all included here, if only because of the, perhaps fanciful, link between nursery rhyme and fairy tale. But the poems here are clever, mysterious, idiosyncratic, on the whole, and as far from simple nursery rhymes as one could imagine. The editors themselves contribute two poems each and I particularly liked Claudia Carlson’s “Sleeping Beauty Has Words” and Jeanne Marie Beaumont’s “Where’s Wolf?” which reflect the very high standard throughout.
All in all, an enjoyable collection to be dipped into, or used as bedtime reading, particularly if you do not mind the odd nightmare or two.
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O L I V E R M U R R A Y, Polyphony Magazine
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Edited by
Jeanne Marie Beaumont & Claudia Carlson
Launch party reviewed at nycbigcitylit.com |
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