Tag: love

Poetry Review: Even Curses End – Catherine Garbinsky

Flicking through the titles of Garbinsky’s Even Curses End, I began by lunging for my copy of Angela Carter’s book of fairy tales before settling into the sofa reading joyfully from simultaneous piles of open books.

Garbinksy has opened the chest of the European tradition’s fairy tales and picked spools from the iconic to the obscure to weave her collection. Her choices remind us that the fairy tale was rarely princesses being rescued, but every day folk battling with a world too vicious to be believed real. Violence links these poems, and in the footsteps of great writers of the genre, she reminds us that envy, cruelty and blood were the fabric of these stories before Disney got hold of them.

Well, re-imaginings of fairy tales have been done. Garbinsky sets a different pattern in her loom by playing with narrative perspectives; merging them to trick our sympathies – is the character addressed in ‘Little Red’ the wolf or the eponymous girl? Is ‘The House on Chicken Legs’ a window to Baba Yaga or the innocent girl sent to her for light? In doing so, Garbinsky weaves what for me was most crucial; shining a light on the symbolic outcast/outsider figure and giving them a voice. The maligned and lonely witch is given the chance to tell of her ‘robin’s egg heart’ beneath the ‘crooked branches’ of her body; we weep with the beast dismayed that its solitude is lifted at last by someone who ‘did not flinch.’ And this I found poignant. Many a schoolchild has been called upon to use the fairy tale to learn empathy and kindness; to imagine the wolf hungry and alone. I felt Garbinsky went to the heart of the matter, recasting today’s marginalised that are feared and hated like beasts and witches; the homeless, the immigrant refugee, the man or woman of a different faith, into these timeless universal characters. To show us what we have in common.

Metamorphosis plays a huge part. Fairy tales have always centred on change, growth, sexual development and these poems can also stand for the metamorphosis of how fairy tales translate from the land of myth to the real world, as ‘The Grey’ seal woman shows us ordinary girls struggling in smothering relationships (in an extraordinarily structured poem that can be read differently downwards and sideways), and lazy girls justly punished by Mother Holle become those too crushed by depression to contribute in the world. Most importantly, many of these poems made me think of love, of human relationships and the transformation love can enact on us. My favourite poem ‘Loving What is Wild’ shows us that the Beast is just someone we don’t yet understand, who is as afraid of our anger and rejection as we are of its difference. The fear is dispelled by kindness; openness unravels the myth, and the curse ‘like an old rug/ Like a tapestry tugged at over years’ falls away and the beast is now a brother. In the perfectly named poem ‘Beauty,’ love redeems the beast, ‘a ritual of hope,’ showing us it is love’s beauty that transforms.

And from this acceptance, more grows. From love comes strength, power, solidarity. The poem ‘Seven Years of Silence’ offers a volta to the collection that gives it its name – a curse finally expires because even in fairy tales, they cannot last forever and the silenced protagonist now shouts ‘like church bells,’ to summon others to hear her herald change, redemption; liberation from trauma. Strength arises in ‘Healing is a Hiding Place;’ the abused Cinderella defiantly invites her persecutors: ‘Let them come. Let them see…I will not shatter,’ life’s traumas will eventually ‘crack…softly like an egg.’

The poem ‘What Desire Can Do’ stood for me as a symbol for the collection. The witch teaches Rapunzel to use ‘not my body, but my voice,’ – she becomes the poet with the tool that allows her to create a love that is beautiful and illuminating; that enriches instead of devours and crushes. Love that transcends hate and fear and transforms bears and beasts into humans, by giving them a voice. The resolution sought by fairy tales.

And life.

I don’t actually know if Catherine Garbinsky was aiming for some big metaphor about prejudice in society and the redemptive power of love – admittedly references to Islamophobia may have been a bit of a stretch. But when I read them – I was woven an image of the incredible potential of love to make a beast a man and give a witch her life back. And I liked that.

To Feed My Woodland Bones

[A Changeling’s Tale] by Kate Garrett – Poetry Review

What makes this collection so captivating is its duality. There is the magical element; the image of the changeling: unwanted, misplaced, caught between worlds and doing its best to manage. Looking at each poem with this mirror reflects this surreal and fascinating character, the ‘merry wanderer of the night’ which so captures the imagination. But this is overlaid with the autobiographical mirror, stories of abuse and survival are transposed over the top of the mythical and both reflect each other. Reality and magic in this collection are woven together, like two eyes you can swim in, both different, both true.

A magical and unreal world is created as a backdrop for every real and traumatic moment. This leaves the reader in a state of suspense, always on the edge of horror, but soothed and kept at arms’ length by a childlike mystery. The poems ‘This Mortal Coil,’ ‘Changeling,’ and ‘An elf turns inside out for the dragon’ speak of very real human loss, isolation and despair. In the first, voice is given to the grief that ‘makes your solid shape unbearable;’ poignantly encapsulating that familiar sensation of wanting to give up; lie down and die when we are bereft. The speaker in ‘Changeling’ is ignored and alternately unliked and unloved by her mother, contrasted with the instinctive nurturing of the mare to her foal. This mother figure ripens eventually to the titular dragon picking ‘drive-thru-visit hoards’ from her teeth with the speaker’s ‘toothpick legs’ – the lair is set and strewn with bones which solidify into the starving ‘skeleton’ of this poem.

But between horrors, and even within them, the world beautifully glimmers. A woodland garden is incanted into being with purple valerium, playful duelling spiders, midnight moon temples, tentacle-waves and razor clams, will o’ the wisp and honey rain. The imagery enchants and weaves magic into the every-day, the changeling from faery walks into the human world trailing glowing beams of spells. The senses are drenched, and we drift away into this bewitching folk land. Garrett decorates it and plays dress-up with her metaphors; ‘an elf summons/ a storm/ and wears her windblown/ water evening gown’ and harvests ‘the sparkle off a slug’s back’ for ‘gemstones.’

And for me, it is this slug sparkle that stands as a major image of this collection – it is a work of transformation. And much of that transformation is just about how you look at things. These poems are of the bravery and strength of surviving – as a changeling exiled from the otherworld or as a human battered in, and exiled from, our own. The changeling is not only exchanged but changes; transformation is the essence of these poems. Darkness is transformed to swirling stars, horror to magic, trauma to birth; power and strength are seized and the elf pixie actively summons storms and songs and makes new life. The recurring motif of the crescent moon in the final poem, the woman’s symbol of growth, birth-magic and love represents the survival and change. The collection culminates with a tumbling prose paragraph of heady, breathless, hardly-daring-to-believe happiness in love, in children, in acceptance of the past and making change for the claimed future. This is the magic we can all strive for and Garrett leaves us this beautifully hopeful image of renewal. Look at the slug and see the finger gemstones.

I have no idea if my highfalutin interpretation is what the poet meant at all. Any active assertions of what these poems ‘are’ or are ‘about’ are my own thoughts, what I loved about them, and what I took from them to keep for myself. This will always be influenced by my own context.

But I loved them.

Kate Garrett’s chapbook is published by Animal Heart Press.

Crow Mother

For aunties and surrogates everywhere.

And for Reuben

Everyone and no one understands the mystery of birth. The superlative creation that any woman can do, if she wants to. Pouring living things out of her, slimy things that wriggle and scream – unlike the dry dead promises of men.

Something animal and entirely Godly. The screams and grunts a woman makes as she digs into a deep and primal place to bring forth her child are more abandoned than any that animal musters. Like dancing; primal and poetic – birthing is too. The wild circles of cries painted in the air – blended whorls of relief, pain, wonder.

This is not a Christmas story.

But a child was born.

*****

He came into the world and blinked – huge black myopic eyes. They tell me all babies are glass blue-eyed when they’re born.

He was not.

His cave-black eyes still reflected the dark safe womb and he stared down at the shadowed table – for comfort. The world is so cold, so loud, so hard. Everything hurts. His skin is as soft as insides and instead we show him edges. Horrified, he screams his way into the world and only those soft dark things – flesh, crevices, darkness comfort him against a world so sharp, so bright and green it hurts.

Mother crow heard him cry. All crows are mothers and aunts and when they hear a baby cry their breasts tug, their lower parts hurt, and it wells together to engender their desperate wailing caw.

No crow can hear a child cry without pouring out her own wail in sympathy.

*****

The little child was loved, so loved, and he was dressed in white and laid in his cradle in the garden in the shade of a great eucalyptus tree. The breeze stirred the leaves to peek through and whispered ‘oh! What a lovely child!’ And the tree jealously wrapped round its trailing tresses so it could keep the lovely child to itself. The bees loved the flowers then followed the budding glow of the child and said to each other ‘he izzz lovely’ and the flowers craned their necks to look at him. Birds flitted down to sing him lullabies.

The child dimly smelled milk and honey. Colours were bright and smudgy. In the glow, he felt better – much better. The sun was warm and soft on his little cheeks; his blankets were soft and edgeless and this new sensation of the gentle breeze and birdsong was lovely to his sightless eyes.

The bees and the trees and the craning clematis and all the flowers agreed he was beautiful, beautiful and they loved him deeply.

And in the garden, under the apple tree, the fairies felt it. They heard the talk of the flowers and the bees and trees and the birds and resolved to take this beautiful baby for their own.

*****

A woman – animal – primal – civilized – creator – walks into her garden with a book and milk; milk for her child.

The cradle is empty.

Her wail lifts and pierces the grey sky.

*****

In fairy land, the changeling child is doted on and loved. Fairies bring him milk and honey and tickle his toes. They sing to him. He is rocked in a cradle woven with dog roses and willowherb and the hawthorn fragrance soothes him on the bank by the stream. The bee sucks at the cowslip and the baby sleeps.

Are fairies wicked? Are they parts of nature? Is the bee wicked for taking the pollen from the rose? We devise romances – she is the go-between, passing love notes between rose and apple blossom until soaked in warm sun and scent, they meld together. Maybe this is like what fairies do.

Or maybe if you are left alone too long, they steal babies away to fairy land out of jealousy – like Oberon jealous of Titania’s changeling boy – and refuse to give them back.

*****

The little child had serious eyes. He awoke to find he was surrounded by ladybirds, moths and newts. He cast his dark eyes down because he remembered his milk and scented mother and she wasn’t there. Then with a crinkling of his smooth brow, like silk crumpled, he closed his eyes on flower and fairy, opened his mouth and cried.

Mother crow, black huge mother, felt his cry pierce her heart and opened her beak to wail.

Mother crow sobbed and wept at the despair of the little child. She hopped down, heavy from her high branch and crept silver-eyed towards him. She laid down her head on his tiny chest to hear him cry and nestled there, burrowed there, with her eyes closed while crystal tears moistened his cheeks and fists. She put her head on his aching heart and felt it – took it –as she nudged in.

And her own heart broke.

Hearing the fading suspiration of her last cry, the other crows flocked down from their high branches, desperate for their sister who had died for the sadness of a human baby. They set up their wail in chorus till the echo lanced the fairies and the people above fairyland, and together the crows carried the baby boy home to his mother.

Mother crow – who loves children so much she keens in despairing fellow feeling when she hears a baby cry – was carried home with the changeling child and brought out of fairy land; back to the garden.  Mother crow laid open eyed and dead upon his breast, but he slept; comforted, with his tiny arm around her wing.

Mother came out into the garden and rejoiced in the sunlight to find her beautiful child restored.

Sensitivity

 ‘There’s quite a lot of blood on this one,’ Tessa muttered into the steaming sink.

‘What?’ Myrtle looked over, elbowing her damp hair away from her eyes.  ‘Another miscarriage?’ The grey haired woman looked up from the mangle.

‘Bring it over.’

Tessa pulled the sopping sheet out of the tub and twisted it fiercely to ring out the excess water. Holding it away from herself and leaning back, she carried it over to the mangle.

The older woman absently drew her finger in a crest behind her ear, clearing away strands of hair she’d never realised had thinned. She gripped the folds of the sheet in both hands, holding flat a portion of the stain. Her green eyes stared, narrowing as she considered it.

‘No, the stain is too dark and it’s too near the top of the sheet.’ She pulled another handful of the linen up into view. ‘And here’s the menses, further down.’ Her eyes locked Tessa’s as she handed the sheet back and they remained this way for a moment. Myrtle had also stopped and all three women looked at each other over the blood smeared sheet with set mouths and jaws flinching.

‘Just clean it,’ the older woman directed.

Tessa took it back and scrubbed it viciously in the thickening silence. Turning her face, but not her eyes, she spat over her shoulder. Her mouth grimaced.

‘It’s nearly every week now you know.’

Myrtle also looked up again and slapped her brush against the tub’s side. ‘And it’s just a mindless–’

‘Clean it.’

Tessa scrubbed bitterly and the stain began to diminish. As if all the misery and ugliness in the world could be cleaned away just like a stain on a sheet. With just a little effort and pain, as her knuckles hit the side of the tub in the fierceness of her scrubbing. Myrtle’s face also twisted as she wrung sheets until her hands hurt. Over it all; the faint creaking of the mangle as the older woman turned the handle. Rotated it rhythmically to impose order on a wrinkled sheet and a rumpled world; to smooth out and remove her sorrows and those of that woman upstairs, shivering alone on her tower bed.

All three minds wandered through different passageways to that same woman. Tessa thought of the ceremony, Myrtle of the girl’s arrival, drenched from a violent storm; the older woman the first miscarriage. All thought of the desire in the Prince’s cruel eyes and the delicacy of the pale girl.

Ripe for violence.

Myrtle cleared her throat. ‘It’s been over a year since she came now.’

‘No,’ Tessa corrected, ‘It was just such bad weather that week. She arrived at the start of August. It’s only spring now.’

‘Oh yes,’ Myrtle looked up to search for the memory and nodded. ‘August rain can be as bad as November; the clouds drop and you wouldn’t know the difference.’ Her eyes glazed again.  ‘She was so straight-backed, wasn’t she? You could tell she was beautiful even though her hair was plastered to her face and her cloak soaked with mud nearly to the elbow. And she didn’t cringe in her wet things as she moved, she was…’ Myrtle searched the high ceiling to her right again for the word. ‘Proud. In the way she walked I mean.’ Tessa grunted her assent.

‘And she spoke nice. Quietly, but assured. Kind. They should have worked it out from that.’

‘But there has to be the Test,’ the old woman spat.

Oh of course. There must be the Test. Tension bubbling and steaming on the borders for months, allies desperately yet fruitlessly searched for and always the anxiety for an heir, an heir. Three years hunting for a suitable alliance while skirmishes broke out and trade lines were blocked, until the kingdom was all but cut off and the Queen despairing while her son rode out to find soldiers at the borders and satisfaction for his lust on the peasant girls the other side. And this bedraggled woman, claiming to be a Princess from another Kingdom who only asked for a night’s board with her pledge of great royal future recompense for the kindness, was promising. She was already at a disadvantage; alone, in flight, in need. She could be compelled. Then alliance, an heir, stability. But to be sure. So the Queen made assurance double sure and with a painted smile, led the girl after dinner to her bedchamber heaped with mattresses. Twenty stacked to the ceiling; the Princess lay there like a fresco painter for the worst night’s sleep of her life.

‘Just a little pea under all those mattresses,’ the old woman murmured.

‘Just a little prick,’ Tessa sneered.

‘Oh Tess, honestly.’

Tessa defended her crassness. ‘She looked worse the next morning than the night before! Haggard. Her eyes were hunted and black. And how she struggled down the stairs. She’d asked for help the night before. I know it is just a pea, but they knew what they were doing, how could they hurt someone so defenceless?’

‘Oh the elite are a cold lot I’d say,’ Myrtle suggested. ‘And it’s a Princess’s duty to be sensitive, to endure for her Kingdom. I suppose once she’d proven her worth, she knew they needed her and she owed them, so she had to stay. But look, when did you see her? I only heard about it from Mary because her Stephen was serving at breakfast.’

‘Because I changed the damn bed,’ Tessa retorted. ‘Eliza couldn’t manage it on her own, there was so much linen. So they sent me up. As I left with me arms full of bedding, she was still making her way down. Her face was contorted with pain, she was biting her lip to stop from whimpering. And the Prince was there, with the Queen, at the bottom of the stairs. Watching intently to see if she had Passed. He had both hands in his pockets and that little smirk and he watched her all the way down. Every step. She was obviously in agony and he never said a word nor moved to help.  Nor the Queen.’

‘Breeding,’ Myrtle sneered. Tessa snorted.

‘Well you can keep it.’

With the Test passed the kingdom was saved. The prince took her as his bride and they had a real princess at last, from a powerful dynasty; a union, an alliance. They were married three weeks later at the start of September. Every servant was ordered to wash and turn out to throw the pink and blue flowers. There was substantial largesse in the celebration. A feast was put on for the servants too, a fiddler was brought from the next valley, and there was dancing. Myrtle remembered the fiddler very well.

But not so well as they all remembered the couple walking out of the palace courtyard after the ceremony. The Prince in his finery, his black hair curling just a little above his collar. His overwhelming exotic scent of bergamot masking the sweat of the warm day as he walked amid the flowered arches through the double line of his cheering subjects. Hope for the kingdom! His long, straight nose curled his upper lip as he smiled right and left right over his bride’s head and the desire was savage in his eyes. It chilled the women as he passed them. And his bride, squinting in the bright sunlight, looked down, still obviously suffering; chewing her lip as she controlled her pain in her slow walk half a pace behind the groom.  Holding her grace, hiding her limp. And spreading upwards from the low cut of her bodice, staining her pearl white skin; the blue and black blush that in three weeks, had not faded.

Autumn. There were subsidies for trade, the economy improved.  The women felt it in the price of flour and fish.  More ribbon at market.  More pennies to buy it. There were reinforcements at the border, and a peace of a kind had been sustained through to winter. Strong and stable.  But still no heir.

That first infliction, the black flush after the storm-soaked August night, was only the start. Conceiving the heir was next. Uncharitable gossip ripped through the servants’ hall about the Princess walking awkwardly, sitting gingerly. Then a breakthrough, whispers of a pregnancy at the start of Advent. A God given Christmas gift for the Kingdom! Then at the end of January the washerwomen found the bright red political disaster smeared all over the bedsheets and a cloud fell over the palace. The older woman washed that sheet herself, taking her time reverently, learning every spot and matching it to her memory, never mixing the splashes from her own eyes with the soap from the tub. Washerwomen; cleaning to purify the ugliness from the world. Then a storm shook the Kingdom one night in February. Without was all thunder and the screaming wind, beating the rain relentlessly against the fortress walls, and within the Prince was beating the Princess against the walls in his fury. Still no heir, no heir. How could peace last without one?

Three servants attended the Princess that night to bathe her skin and press it softly with witch hazel. But skin is not like the sheets the washerwomen took, and while blood can be rinsed away, the blue blush cannot. The Prince was subdued in the days after this and the Princess kept to her chamber. The moon waxed and then when the washerwomen cleaned the menses off the sheets, blood from a battered face began appearing regularly.

‘It’s done,’ Tessa said at last. She threw an end to Myrtle and they began twisting from both ends to ring out the water.

‘It’s all we can do,’ the older woman sighed.

‘It’s like we’re hiding it.’

‘It’s all we can do.’

‘Can’t she ask for help?’ Myrtle blurted. ‘Powerful family like hers, I’m sure they’d not like this happening to one of their line.’

‘I suppose it’s probably shame,’ the older woman answered.

‘You had none,’ Tessa reminded.

‘Well,’ the older woman’s eyes darkened. ‘Maybe she has no one to ask. Perhaps it’s different asking a neighbour as opposed to a far-off Lord who’s married you off.’

‘Our little coup de grace was pretty good, wasn’t it?’ Tessa snickered.

‘Yes…’ the older woman admitted, allowing herself a half smile. ‘After twenty five years, another day drinking the rent and he never knew what hit him.’

‘Tessa’s poker did, I recall,’ Myrtle grinned. ‘And off away he went at last! A well-co-ordinated operation, ladies.’

‘Well, enough was enough, wasn’t it,’ the older woman leaned back from her waist to stretch out her shoulders. ‘I make enough from the wash and it’s peaceful enough indoors now. It’s different for you and your men these days. You can build something. And your sons will be better. And your daughters will never have seen that sort of thing.’ She finished her stretch and held out her arms. ‘That’s fine girls, bring it here now. It’s the last one, then we’re done and tomorrow is Sunday.’

‘You seeing your fiddler tomorrow Myrtle?’ Tessa asked with a devilish glint.

‘Stop calling him that, his name’s David.’

‘He’s good though, isn’t he? At fiddling?’

‘Stop it. Honestly Tessa, you’ve got no poetry in you. We’ll walk up the crag to the tarn. He said he’ll bring his violin. You know, when he plays, it’s like being on the crags with the heather, it’s lovely.’

‘Yep, soaring up there, penetrating those clouds, all very…’

‘That’s enough girls, pack it in and go home,’ the older woman interrupted as she emptied the tubs. The women splashed cold water on their faces to cool themselves, then dried off their arms and folded the last sheet. Myrtle opened the door into the bright early May sunshine.

‘How did your apple wine come out in the end?’ she asked, turning hopefully to the older woman, who smiled knowingly.

‘Well, I suppose it needs a test!’ She stretched her arm through Myrtle’s to support herself and reached for the other girl. ‘You too Tess, come round to mine first and try it. If it’s any good, I’ll pack you both off with a jug. I’m sure you’d like some for your little outing tomorrow Myrtle, in case of a picnic, and Tess, I’m sure you and your husband aren’t averse to a weekend tipple.’

The women walked home in the sunshine.