My fuchsia is a middle-aged woman who’s had fourteen children, and though she could do it again, she’s rather tired. All through the summer, new blooms. I’m amazed. But the purple and crimson have paled. Some leaves are yellowed or withering. These buds look weaker and smaller, like menopause babies. Yet still she’s a gallant fine creature performing her function. -Thats how they talk about women, and I heard myself using the same sort of language. Then I understand my love for August : it’s exhausted fertility after glut and harvest. Out in the garden, playing at being a peasant forced to slave until dark with a child on my back another at the breast and probably pregnant, I remember wondering if I’d ever manage the rites of passage from girl to woman : fear and fascination hard to choose between. Thirty years later, I pick the crumpled flowers off the fuchsia plant and water it as if before the shrine of two unknown grandmothers – and my mother who was a fourteenth child.
There among the roots and trunks with the mushrooms pulsing inside the moss he planned how to eat them both, the grandmother an old carrot and the child a sly budkin in a red red hood. He bade her to look at at the bloodroot, the small bunchberry and the dogtooth and pick some for her grandmother. And this she did. Meanwhile he scampered off to Grandmother’s house and ate her up as quick as a slap.
The image which accompanies this short introduction to Ann Sexton’s book Transformations is from that other mistress of the dark tale/fairy tale’s pen, Angela Carter. The image is from the Neil Jordan produced movie, The Company of Wolves , which Carter scripted based in her collection of Fairy Tales and Wolf stories of transformation and Metamorphoses. The tales did not include those which sit outside of the theme of the movie and are among her classic writing, so I’d generally urge readers who like women’s novels, fiction, prose and critique to seek out Ms Carter’s opus which is available in book shops and on Amazon. High on my list of personal recommendations isThe Bloody Chamber (Bluebeard), The Lady of the House of Love (Vampire) and her essays Expletives Deleted.
I bought Transformations on Friday morning to read on the way home from a brief holiday in my usual haunt, The Rare and Interesting Bookshop, in Mayo, as I have given up on Newspapers doing anything but horrifying me (and not in the delightful Carteresque manner).
Here are Briar Rose, Cinderella, wicked step-mothers, Rumpelstiltskin, The Little Peasant and the coterie of Grimm falling out of the slim but packed volume of tales of transformations and metamorphoses. The twist is in the language and schemes, as opposed to the twists and turns in Carter’s feminist and microscopic eye in her versions.
Briar Rose
Consider a girl who keeps slipping off, arms limp as old carrots into the hypnotist’s trance, into a spirit world speaking with the gift of tongues. She is stuck in the time machine, suddenly two years old sucking her thumb, as inward as a snail, learning to talk again. She’s on a voyage. She is swimming further and further back up like a salmon, struggling into her mother’s pocketbook.
Briar Rose, by Ann Sexton.
Do read the book, it isn’t by any means a new book , but all books are new when discovered , bought or found. And no-one can really tell how one will react to the images, content or stories therein. Always new books are something critics and interpreters forget are an adventure to the mind.
I have included at the end here the name of a collected Carter, the title of the Sexton and a link to another Ann Sexton poem which is on Poethead.
Chris Murray 