davidkm

Yolen, Jane, 2012, The Last Selchie Child, A Midsummer Night's Press (www.spdbooks.org; orders@spdbooks.org), Cover photograph by M. A. Mathews, ISBN-13:978-0-9794208-9-4, perfect bound, 66 pages, $14.95.

Jane Yolen is one of our venerable masters, both of fiction and poetry. She won the Rhysling award of the Science Fiction Poetry Association in 1993, as well as many other awards, some far more prestigious. Yolen was named SFPA Grand Master in 2010. It is always a pleasure to open one of her books for the first time. The Last Selchie Child is a collection of fairy tales retold as poems, 36 of them, including Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, and Little Red Riding Hood, just to name four.

I lied already. The first part of the book is a group of poems about stories and storytelling. From “Story”:

You shape a tale
To fit your mind.

And so it goes,
In re-creation,
Mouth-to-ear
Resuscitation,

Several poems deal with the legends of people who can be seals or seals who can be people. There is plenty of room for sorrow and betrayal in a situation like this. From “The Selchie's Children's Plaint”:

She leaves us then, without a word
wading into her future.
It hurts like a knife
skinning us as we watch her go.
We were the ones
who were to dive into another life.

Some of these poems look at fairytale stories from new perspectives. Instead of the omniscient narrator, we see things from the point of view of the woman, the child, the prince. This is indeed a fruitful kind of reversal, pointing out the dark underbelly or ludicrousness of the traditional versions of these stories. But sometimes the shift in perspective shows us more. “Knives” reveals more horror in Cinderella than the by-now familiar idea of what happens after the wedding. Cinderella might not have been the naïve young thing most of us thought.

I spoke to the prince in that secret tongue,
the diplomacy of courting.
he using shoes, I using glass,
and all my sisters saw was a slipper,
too long in the heel,
too short at the toe.
What else could they use but a knife?

Fair young things seem to wait so long for something to happen, in fairy tales. How long is too long? From “Tower”:

I have found
the small barred window,
where I sing each morning
to any passing prince.
Be he large or small, handsome or plain,
I will have him.

After a while, you wait your life away, and anything at all becomes enough. How much becomes plain, although unstated, in a clear-eyed reading of fairy tales? The most interesting thing about this book, for me, is that familiar fairy tales are re-imagined in several different ways in different poems. We don't end up with simply two perspectives, but three, four, and perhaps others that we can imagine for ourselves, now that the way has been shown.

The last section of the book consists of a group of poems about “truth,” which is to say that the stories we have been told are wrong, wrong, wrong. Indeed they are! From “Women's Stories”:

Job's wife had her own story.
Lot's pillar of salt cried tears
indistinguishable from her eyes.
Who invented a glass slipper
never had to dance.

It might be needless to say I think you should buy this book. But just in case, I'll say it. You really should buy this book. You won't be sorry.