 Read a sample from the book.
In Voices in Fairyland, Theodora Goss offers four fascinating essays and
several poems in conversation with the poems of Mary Coleridge, Charlotte
Mew, and Sylvia Townsend Warner. In her Introduction, Goss writes:
Coleridge, Mew, and Warner are only three examples of what I consider a
broader phenomenon, the rest of the ice that must be present, underwater,
when we see icebergs floating on a northern sea. That underwater ice is the
tradition of women writing fantastical poetry. I will show you what I mean
by focusing on one theme. Over and over again, women have written about
witches. In "Witch-Wife," Edna St. Vincent Millay describes a woman whose
"voice is a string of coloured beads, / Or steps leading into the sea" who
"was not made for any man," not even the narrator, to whom she is
married. The witch in Anne Sexton's "Her Kind" is fiercer and stronger. She
tells us,
I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
She creates a domestic space for herself in a place that is decidedly
undomestic, that is wild, feeding worms and elves rather than the children
that the women who are not witches presumably feed. "A woman like that is
misunderstood," Sexton tell us, and we can certainly understand why, if her
voice is a string of colored beads or those mysterious steps. She must
speak differently, in a language that we cannot quite understand. And here
is Emily Dickinson:
Witchcraft was hung, in History,
But History and I
Find all the Witchcraft that we need
Around us, every Day—
Whatever you do, she implies, you cannot eradicate witchcraft. It is part
of the world around us, always present. And we—History and Emily
Dickinson—need witchcraft. I wonder what they need it for exactly, but
Emily Dickinson, always her enigmatic self, does not tell us.
ISBN: 978-1-933500-21-8 (13 digit)
Publication Date: May 2008
paperback 148 pages
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