"Then in his fury he seized his left foot with both hands and tore himself in two right down the middle." (Sound like any country you know?) Breathless necromancy, the psychology dark and jagged as an evening stroll through the Black Forest itself.
In this, her seventh book, Diane Fahey has taken the taut little riddles of the Brothers Grimm and turned them into powerful psychological poetry. In her previous 1998 effort, Listening to a far sea, Fahey served up the same spectacular treatment to the Greek myths. Perhaps not the most original idea in modern literature but, where one could be expected to find the stale and the twee, each poem instead seemed to leap right off the page like sunlight off an Aegean rock pool. In that very brave and special book, Fahey's treatment of what we now so flacidly term survivor guilt at least equals the prolific outpourings of that great Alexandrian, Cavafy:
He has no memory
and what he sees is that nothing is happening….
only life itself - pigeons on terraces,
hot dinners, urchins in a field.
He wants something, anything, to happen
that will change all this.
Walking, later, through the ruined village,
he says over and over, This is real.
(from Ares, Listening to a far sea)
I regarded it as a brave book because of the inevitable comparisons with Cavafy and Robert Graves, to name but two giants of the 20th century. But Fahey was more than up to the task.
As you would expect, there is less light in this latest collection: things aren't so clearly defined. The voices, though always detached and floating high above the action, still manage to lose themselves at times in that German labyrinth so despised by Caesars and Popes. Unlike the Greek myths, the Grimm tales are not poised to leap through the ashen membrane of our world. On the contrary, they are cramped and inward-looking. Cautionary tales. Their purpose is to remind us of the price, not the value, of living, and the choices we make in so doing.
I will not be alone; I'll not be beholden.
I refuse ever to be bested.
She thinks of me as malleable, needy -
but I am intractable. Always.
If one I pursue - no matter for what
reason, for what reason I know not -
hides in the dovecote or pear tree, I'll cut down
that dovecote, that pear tree, crush all the doves
(from "Ashputtle")
The poem from which this is lifted is based on a darker variant of the Cinderella tale. "Ashputtle" is dubbed so by her wicked step-sisters because every night "In ashes by the hearth, she toils/and sleeps". The poor girl is forced to endure dreadful hardship for no other crime than existing (sound familiar?). It is a leitmotif of the Grimm tales and one that Fahey seems to lose herself in at times, as though the world portrayed is a little too like our own.
It is the rank fiction of human singularity that is at question in many of these poems. We are not what we appear to be. The Greeks found this fact (this non-singularity) liberating, but then they didn't have to live in the cloying darkness of the German forests. They seem tortured by this duality in human nature. In fact the contrast between Fahey's Greek and German books is like the story of our times writ large.
I am only dwelling on this point because these poems inspire me to. She has guts, this poet, and a clear understanding of what makes a story soar and a lie fall flat, apropos the "Sixth Swan" of the title with his vestige of a wing. We are ruled by liars and will continue to be so until we have learnt the difference between a lie and a story, a frog and a prince, straw and gold.
(Reviewed by Justin Lowe, June 2007)
