Reviews

Catherynne M. Valente, A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects (Norilana, 2008)

Few things are as worth waiting for as a new book by Catherynne Valente. As these things usually go, few things fill me with imaptientce at the waiting for them as a new book by Catherynne Valente. My current monetary situation (and the book's current, as I write this, availability situation where libraries are concerned—a most grievous oversight indeed) had me waiting far too long to pick up A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects, Valente's first book of poetry since 2005's Apocrypha. It was, however, entirely worth the wait.

I'm not sure I believed that Valente was capable of improving on the already-stellar work in Apocrypha, but there are pieces here that do so. While there's nothing in the book that falls short of the standard Valente set for herself in that last book, there are a handful of pieces that transcend even that:

“Hades is a place I know in Ohio,
at the bottom of a long, black stair
winding down I-76 from Pennsylvania,
winding down the weeds
through the September damp
and that old tangled root system
of asphalt and asphodel,
to the ash-fields,
clotted with fallen acorns
like rain puddled in fibrous pools.”
(“The Descent of the Corn-Queen of the Midwest”)

Anyone can make a person who's already seen something see it again in his mind. The point of poetry is to make someone who hasn't already seen it have a similar experience (similar because, as we all know, no two perceptions of a given even are identical, depending on the baggage, the mood, perhaps even the amount of caffeine extant in the system each reader brings to the table). That's how it's supposed to work in a really good book of poetry.

The title of the book implies retellings of old folktales, perhaps, in the vein one would find in the work of Angela Carter, Wendy Walker, or a number of other (and somewhat less accomplished than those twin doyennes of the modern form) retellers who have emerged in the past few years. And to be sure, there are fragments of tales here that you might recognize. But Valente knows, somewhere deep in her bones, that all tales are in some way folk tales; it's just that for most tales, the folk haven't appeared yet. And thus it is that personal history can be woven into folk tales (and if it's not personal history in some of these pieces, then I'm even more impressed):

“When they came to visit us last Christmas,
he grumbled about the capitalist dogma
of our spangled ornaments,
our 9 pound turkey glistening like a gold-skinned baby,
our soft mezzo-soprano two-part harmony.
He spat after her when she went to Mass.

I stayed behind
to wash the big turkey plate,
and he leaned against the black kitchen counter,
leering at me like an overseer.
He put his hands over mine in the soapy water,
and they were cold as storms.
He whispered in my ear,
his breath full of low clouds.
(“Gringa”)

It's not just the confessional poetry that's been in vogue since the fifties, it's something more, something with that slight tang of legend. It says “This is a tale to tell around a campfire after all the children have gone to bed, scared of men with hooks for hands and creeping vines.” At this point, I had also planned to quote from the quietly devastating “The Eight Legs of Grandmother Spider”, the book's most personal piece, but there's no way to give you the full effect of the piece without giving you the whole thing, which is too long for a review. The same could be said, of course, with the two poems referenced above, but I could use pieces to point things out. You won't get the full effect of those until you read them for yourself, and that is something you should do as soon as possible. Valente is a true talent, right up there with America's best working authors—Walker, Koja, Taaffe, a handful of others—and the sooner your discover her gifts, the less you'll have to go back and experience when you inevitably decide to gobble up everything she's already written. *****

kimberlybea's review

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4.0

I bought this ebook on a whim from Valente's website. I mention this because I don't necessarily read books of poetry straight through---unless they are written as a cycle of narrative poems---but rather flip through them, alighting upon those which catch my eye. I'm kind of glad I did read this one straight through, partly because it made me notice poems that I might not otherwise have, and partly because, whether intended as such or not, the prose sections, written like descriptions from an academic work on folklore, did seem to have a particular narrative flow.
Catherynne Valente is a rising star in the genres of mythic poetry and fiction; her writing reminds me at times of Angela Carter and Tanith Lee, the fictional academia of Jane Yolen in her Sister Light, Sister Dark series and in Cards of Grief, and the fairy tale poetry of Anne Sexton and Olga Broumas. Trained as a classicist (yay!), Valente shows a wide familiarity with folklore of diverse regions and, in . . .Fragile Dialects, even brings that mythic awareness to the New Testament ("An Issue of Blood") and the agrarian regions of the US ("The Descent of the Corn-Queen of the Midwest"). She has a strong feminist sensibility, which shines through, for example, in what is today my favorite poem of the collection "Suttee," which imagines Persephone and Sita from the Ramayana as sisters; the former is doomed to spend half her life in the Underworld, while the latter has escaped her demonic captor through a trial by fire. By now, it may not be a new thing to give voice to our lost heroines, but Valente does an impressive job, writing with conviction and with elegance and not shying away from either sensuality and violence. What's more, as was evident in her award-winning The Orphan's Tales duology, she is equally able to create new folklore, which is convincingly familiar and yet surprisingly new.

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