A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects ~Catherynne M. Valente

–published 2008
–Norilana Books
–163 pages

The cover of this book, an art piece done by Connie Toebe, has intrigued me since I first laid eyes on it on the Endicott Studio website. April being National Poetry Month, and the first month of this year’s Once Upon a Time Challenge, it seemed like the ideal time to explore the treasures that this wonderful image promised.

I certainly do not pretend to be anything other than a mere dabbler in the genre of poetry, and despite my fascination for old folklore and fairy tales I am no where near being familiar with much of what exists in that realm. Given those facts I have to admit that I found Valente’s book to be quite the challenge, albeit in the very best sense.

A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects is a book of poems written by Catherynne M. Valente featuring a variety of female characters in stories as dark and mysterious as the original folktales to which they pay homage. In the vein of works like Angela Carter, Valente eschews the well worn stereotypes of female roles that dominate more recent, watered down versions of the stories handed down from long ago. Instead her characters, be they victims or victors, are strong, unconventional women whose stories seem both familiar and foreign at the same time.

The collection contains some poems that seem pretty straight forward and others that are quite enigmatic, depending on one’s knowledge of the folk stories of old. Regardless of the kind, each contains untold depths that just beg to be studied and talked about. I couldn’t help but wish there had been a companion volume to each piece so that I could delve into and research her inspirations as I read each work. Interspersed between various groupings of poems are brief “Tale Types” that describe various kinds of folktales and include an example of each. These were, without fail, engaging and educational and lent insight into the poems that followed.

In this Guide I found characters that were familiar, either in name or in circumstance, and others that danced around my head hinting at previous knowledge that I could not quite access. Valente’s gift is obvious as one moves through this collection. That fact makes it all the more difficult for me to find the words to accurately describe this slim treasure. Thankfully author and friend Midori Snyder does an excellent job of doing just that in her introduction:

“There is a gentle irony in the title, for there is nothing fragile about the rich, organic language of these poems, their images deeply rooted in the senses and in nature. Here Rapunzel grows into the wild rampion of her origin, a fox wife wears two skins, a housebound woman evolves slowly into a tree, and an abusive husband transforms into a taloned crow.”

This is not a book to be rushed through, instead it is a book to be savored. To be sampled slowly so that each poem has time to digest. I began this book over a month ago and took my time, reading one or two poems at a time every few days.

“I crawl to you on belly henna-bright,
teeth out,
scratching the basil sprouts—
eyes flash phosphor. In the late light,
slant gold light,
you must see
the old tail echo
beneath my muddy dress:
two, three, nine.

I howl against the barking churchbells:
Give it back, give it back,
I need it.

Be it poetry or prose, I enjoy it most when the words strung together have a lyrical quality to them, and Valente’s verse is very musical.

“We chose her for her hair.
And for the thinness of her wrists
and the promise of her hips,
which seemed to foreshadow sons,
and for the way she played in the alley-ways,
the slip-jump
of her dancing gait on sap-strung terraces.

We had to choose someone.”

While the collection has an overall sense of melancholy and heaviness to it, for few of the tales of old ended in ‘happily ever after’, there are some that end sweetly, giving a nice bit of balance to the book.

Poetry is not for everyone, that I will readily admit. But if you delight in the mystery of stories built on and around whisperings of tales that have passed down from generation to generation, then I would highly encourage you to give this collection a try. I freely admit that there are many more riches here than I in my inexperience was able to unearth, but the parts that were challenging did nothing but light a spark in me to learn more about the mythic so that the next time I come to this collection…and I strongly suspect there will be a ‘next time’, I will be better prepared to honor what Catherynne M. Valente has accomplished.

As I close this review, I will leave you with this small section from one of the Tale Types that I think all book lovers will enjoy:

“There is a story which the books in certain libraries tell one another when the librarian has turned out the lights and gone home to soup and kettle. This would have remained a secret but for a student who fell asleep in one of these libraries and was not glimpsed by the cleaning staff on their final rounds, and so awoke past midnight with pages in a stir all around her, whispering periodical to encyclopedia, index to glossary.”

Wonderful to imagine, isn’t it?
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This book is a selection for:

The Once Upon a Time IV Challenge