Into the Woods
Happy new year everyone! I spent new year’s day working on this beautiful jigsaw depicting some of the Brother Grimms’ fairytales. I love fairytales, of course, and they recur throughout my books and poems - in many ways because they are full of such powerful and resonant symbols: towers, fur, hair, glass slippers, fairy fruit, poisoned apples, mirrors, houses with chicken legs, spindles, frogs, wolves in grandmothers’ clothing, tangled roses, spun straw, blood on snow.
I’m very excited to be going to see Stephen Sondheim’s fairytale musical Into the Woods next week at the Bridge Theatre, and will also be teaching a workshop called Into the Woods for the Poetry Business next Tuesday 13th Jan 11-12.30am online, if you fancy it. It’s £25 or £20 concession.
I’ve been looking at my favourite fairytale poems in preparation. What are your favourites? I adore Anne Sexton’s 1971 collection Transformations where she retells fairytales in the voice of a ‘middle-aged witch’, subverting them and bringing suppressed sexuality back to the surface. It must surely have influenced Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber? The poems certainly influenced me deeply - Sexton can’t resist witty, deliberate anachronisms for example, and they have littered my own work ever since. Here is Sexton’s deeply disturbing ‘Briar Rose’, that suggests a darker reason for Sleeping Beauty’s catatonic sleep.
Others that come to mind: Robert Browning’s classic ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ of course. More contemporary updatings such as Gluck’s ‘Gretel in Darkness’, Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Little Red-Cap’, Lisel Mueller’s ‘Reading The Brothers Grimm to Jenny’… I’d love to hear your suggestions…
And if you have your own fairytale poems and are a member of the Poetry Society, enter their new member’s competition on the theme of ‘fairytales’ which I am judging! You can send me them as attachments via the email: jace@poetrysociety.org.uk - including your membership number- by February 1st 11.59pm. Presumably any later and your poems will turn into pumpkins….
Into the dark forest of 2026 we go.
It's not poetry but prose, but if you don't already know it, Sara Maitland's book Gossip from the Forest, subtitled 'The tangled roots of our forests and fairytales', Granta, 2012, is very good - it includes her re-tellings of 12 fairy tales, inc. Rumpelstiltskin, Hansel & Gretel, Rapunzel, etc.