A collection that tells the tales we need to hear

The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison by Maggie Smith
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Maggie Smith’s new collection looms rich in terrible “grim” fairy tales, told with a hint of the child’s voice but very much adult in theme and honesty. Veils slip aside briefly to suggest ancient myths and stories told over the eons to try to help us understand the falling of stars and dying of everything we love or touch. Wolves and birds are mythic beings. The forest invades our nightmares and day dreams. The common lurches into the eerie and back again.

The commonplace weirds into the uncommon: “The seatbelt buckle branded/its open mouth into your wait.” Nature dreams itself into our daylight: “Wrens pinned like brooches/to the trees, singing, their eyes glass beads.” Always, death lurks in the eyes of the forest and in the inanimate briefly animated: “When the stone/healed behind you, it sounded like a lid closing over a tomb.”

Smith identifies with other beings, becoming the other, allowing the other to enter into herself: “I began as one cricket singing/one song. Soon we were all singing,” and contemplates the self-consciousness that removes her from the whole as well as the inevitable silence from the chorus of the living:

The sound/of me missing might be clearer
than my song. I could gift it to the night,
which misses its dear, departed silences.

Or finally:
“One night the cricket finished boring
through the air to me. But before I could see him,
the trees went dark and took me with them.

I had not been familiar with Maggie Smith’s writing, but I will certainly look forward to reading more of her poetry. This collection of adult fairy tales courageously faces life and its end with simple eloquence and even a touch of wicked charm.


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