Goblin Fruit Summer 2009
Imma attempt to do this in a vaguely coherent fashion. I make no promises.
One of the things I love about Goblin Fruit is that there always seems to be a theme, but it's not a theme as easily identified as, say, "poems about water sprites" or "illusions." Appropriately, it tends to feel more like a gourmet meal, each poem a flavor in a given course, all chosen to complement each other and build toward the next course, until you end the meal full and half-dreaming and trapped forevermore Underhill, but I speak not of that as the Goblin Queens speak not of the Undertow.
The first thing to set the tone is the artwork, which gives one a hint of what's coming up. I miss Spring's seatheme, which was so tailor-made for me, but I adore the not-quite-pastel wide-gaping mouth of the rainbow creature that welcomes us to Summer. Click Enter, and why, there is an Imp to welcome you with an offering of richly-colored fruit (does it not look delectable? Surely one bite wouldn't hurt). Pay no attention to the sharp teeth above and below the Table of Contents. I am certain they are only for decoration. Admire instead the curlicues and whimsical near-hearts of the side borders. Delightful, no?
As always, the issue leads off with a Note from the Editors, this one to taunt indicate the issue was launched from Readercon. Also to indicate the availability of the first hardcopy volume available under the Goblin Fruit banner, the inaugural chapbook of a series to be called Fresh From the Vine: Demon Lovers and Other Difficulties, by Nicole Kornher-Stace, with artwork by that selfsame Oliver Hunter who graces the Goblin Fruit site with his visions, and a dual-voice poem rounded out by C.S.E. Cooney. Should either poet be unfamiliar to you, they are both conveniently featured in this issue of Goblin Fruit, and you can be sure you will gain my envy as well as their lovely poetry should you decide to spring for a copy of Demon Lovers Et Al. And while the envy of sea creatures is not a thing to court lightly, I would not blame you for considering it worth the cost in this instance (not that I would spare you, but nor would I blame you).
But to return to the issue at hand, our fine editrixes chose Nicole Kornher-Stace as Summer's feature poet, and in fact the poems featured are the self-same pieces (minus the collaboration with Mistress Cooney) that appear in the above-mentioned chapbook. So you can preview what you're getting, which is always handy. Given the title of the chapbook, it should be no surprise the four poems are focused on the trials and tribulations of taking up with an otherworldly creature. "This Is Not a Love Story" both does and doesn't lie in the title, the piece evoking numerous faery tales and the teetering of the heroines between punishment and reward for being active. The framing device is an older woman, grandmother or mother, lecturing a daughter. The language is plain-spoken, with the richness in the imagery, which is a style I particularly like. Which is not to say there's no cadence to the wording, a kind of oral storytelling quality that leads to solid emphasis on the lines "Girl, you read too much," and, "Girl, you dream too much," underscoring their poignancy. My only complaint is that there is no similar build-up in the final stanza, an echoing phrase on which to end. "The wherewithal to choose" is lovely and rounded, but doesn't quite carry that emotional punch.
"Janet Stands Her Ground Before the Queen" gets more specific than "This Is Not a Love Story," playing specifically with the ballad of "Tam Lin." While the title led me to expect Janet's viewpoint, in fact the poem is a sonnet wherein the Queen addresses Janet as she does Tam Lin at the end of the ballad. The content reminded me of another poem I read some twenty years ago, mentioning the inevitability of Janet's changing shape as she ages. Kornher-Stace makes excellent use of her form, with end-rhymes that feel natural even as they underline the formality of the Queen's words: she is not cursing Janet only because she doesn't need to. Janet's nature as a mortal creature has done that for her.
Mortals truly are disadvantaged in the world of demons, tricksters, and changelings, and "The Changeling Always Wins" is a fine example of how that works. A mother convinced her child is a Changeling would happily trade the mischievous creature for her true baby. Its fits and tantrums are alarming, and she considers other means of being rid of it,
Cut it open, turn its insides out?
What would I find?
A clockwork heart, a clot of earth,
a vein-fine plait of baby hair tied thrice,
which I might recognize?
(The long knives whisper darkly in their block.)
But, of course, the Changeling smiles, and thoughts of taking it apart are forgotten in the face of the possibility of a bond, and the hope that maybe this is her child after all. Hope and love, the way mortals feed monsters, monsters feed mortals, and poets feed readers (does it not look delectable? Surely one bite wouldn't hurt).
So the Changeling is fed and grows, to pass into an unlove story of its own. Or perhaps it's the same unlove story from whence it sprang. "The Demon Lover's Child Grows Up" seems clear enough on the cyclical nature of the monster in question, and his displeasure at being trapped in child form, thanks to a mortal love more clever than he'd intended. He's a seething, resentful creature, and now she haunts him as surely as he ever tormented her:
...I've debauched
priestesses, teased queens, caused empresses
to soak their silks, and dallied with more witches
than these pipsqueak brats have toes. And there you are,
you bitch, never quite out of mind: I cannot touch them
but you leap back out of memory, all mouth
and lap and arms, devouring
as rain....
It comes full circle, lover into mother, child grown to lover of another girl who is "waiting anyway. She calls it/trying for a baby. She says/she's hoping for a boy." A very powerful poem, with juicily vicious imagery and lovely rolling assonance.
Stepping back into the main Table of Contents with our appetites thus whetted, the first course set before us is presented under the verse to stitch your palm. The titles of the poems echo the idea of bindings, the sort that require blood. "Sumerian Love Song" by Mary Alexandra Agner lives up to that promise. There is a note under the by-line that the poem was "adapted from Samuel Noah Kramer's translation of BM24975," and the structure of the poem evokes an older one and the culture in which it flourished. The topic of the piece is the anticipated return of a longed-for lover, and the musical implications of the title certainly match the repetitions, like choruses, that characaterize the poem. For example:
He comes as a swallow
which never sets,
a dragonfly rising
over the water
and skimming the mist
over the water,
skimming the mountain-grass
floating on water.
This poem has an audio component. There's such a strong cadence in the written form, and that comes through clearly in the author's reading.
Among anticipated lovers returning falls the figure of Odyseuss, and "Penelope's Bed," by Karen Berry, addresses the woman who waited for him so long and faithfully, when faithful is not exactly a term that can be applied to the man himself. Luckily, while he has been dallying with Calypso and Circe, Penelope has found her own means of comfort and diversion, and while Odyseuss is still welcome in it ("Come to us, wanderer, come/to the roots, the wood, the bark"), there's some question about whether he'll ever be able to get out again.
Perhaps the bed has become acquaintances with "The Woman Giving Birth to Air," by Neile Graham, for "Head, arms, legs splayed, she's open to anything." The strength of this poem is the striking, almost steampunkish imagery of a woman who holds within herself the ability to conceive anything. There's a kind of breathless quality to the poem's structure, a tumbling down from a top-heavy line to begin each stanza, all the way down to the hard-edged two syllable last lines of each stanza. The author reads to emphasize that structure, the swollen possibilities of the woman, and the grounding of her in herself.
Alex Dally MacFarlane takes the stitching more literally in "Beautifully Mutilated, Instantly Antiquated." There's a refrain preceding listings of item and cost as in an antique shop, with each listing followed by a stanza that builds the picture of a heroine out of some lost, harrowing tale. While most of the poetic aspect of this piece seems imposed by form rather than intrinsic to phrasing, and line breaks seem primarily spaces to pause for breath, the language is still beautiful, and the shape of the thing on the page. Given the subject matter, that's a justifiable end unto itself.
From this stitching, we come to the implement: the thorn of roads, and the first of our wielders (or are they wielded against?) is a creature travelling, Shweta Narayan's "Apsara," first among the Sidhe, then to other mythologies. I saw some of the impetus for the creation of this poem, and it is aching and beautiful and lyric. There are too many gorgeous lines, but the refrain of "tones tones semitones" sticks with me, with its freight of bittersweet musicality. For me, this piece echoes off my migratory life as well as the distance between my homeland and those places from whence my ancestors and their folklore sprang. See what song it sings to you, and be sure not to miss the audio, the clear rage and longing of it.
Longing is a strong thread through the tale of True Thomas, one Neile Graham uses to bind "True Thomas at Secret Cove" tightly to the seastrand. There's wondrous imagery in this piece, which I wanted to love, but the style strikes me as too abrupt for enchantment. That may be the point; the enunciation in the audio file seems to bear this idea out, that the words are meant to call to mind the broken currents of water hitting jagged shoreline. Effective, then, if not my preference.
"Displaced" works better for me, again from the talented pen of Shweta Narayan. This one is very much rooted in the desert suburbs and swimming pools of Southern California, dry green and chlorine in the air, and a mix of cultures rubbing mythologies. This one is dialogue-heavy, and the cadences work to my mental ear, a few regional flavors sharpening each other at the edges, yet together giving a taste of the area. Narayan does a good job of intoning those flavors in the audio file, so that the nixie is influenced by the Valley dwellers she most likely hears on a regular basis, and Grandfather lizard sounds more like the landscape up I-15, a national forest of cactus and dunes.
Gale Acuff's "Secret Identity" wanders to the other side of the country and specifies a modern setting, Georgia of 1966. This could be a straightforward poem about a little boy who likes superheroes, picking a comic book to buy when there aren't many options available. There's a twist toward the end, though, the boy thinking "I've got a gal inside me somewhere/too, and I can let her out," and that deepens the concept and the title both. Like "Displaced," this poem's cadence is strongly regional, and it's a shame there's no audio file. I'd like to have heard it.
Luckily, there is an audio file to accompany C.S.E. Cooney's "Coyote Does Chicago." The setting of the title actually only applies in the first stanza, with the rest of the poem wandering back West. I can't help but read this as part of a series with "Cody Coyote" from the Spring issue, and both poems have a strongly chant-like quality, on which the audio files capitalize. It makes me curious (and hopeful) whether Autumn will bring a third adventure.
In Summer yet, the thorn splits the feast only for a new binding to be set. The next course's purpose is to lash your hip, though "Raqs Shaqi" by Joshua Gage acknowledges how dangerous the attempt at such a binding might be. Unfortunately, it's an acknowledgement from the outside, the ostensible subject of the poem objectified by language that focuses on external physicality rather than internal rhythm. I mentally compare it to fragments of poetry shared in the belly dancing communities of which I've been a part, and wish for deeper insights into the dancer's mind as part of future pieces on the topic.
Perhaps as a result of my dissatisfaction, Thomas Zimmerman's "The Sweet Hell Within" not only reads as commentary on the phenomenon of the male artist's tendency to position women as inspiration, muses, rather than arists in our own right, but it also reads as something of a critique of the preceding piece. I know this isn't possible as far as auctorial intention, but it says something about what I view as a strongpoint of Goblin Fruit: the careful placement of pieces to create a kind of dialogue with each other. Without this aspect, Zimmerman's piece is sharp and dark, but not terribly unusual, which in itself says something about perceptions of male and female creativity.
Alexis Vergalla's "Wolf and Girl" offers another perspective on the issue, in fact, making use of "Little Red Riding Hood" to address gender expectations, male predation, and how rare it is that "he is split/from navel to throat." Even the physicality of the description is rare, when women are frequently described in terms of their bodies. Food for thought, indeed, especially when taken with Anna Renz's "Tam Lin's Thoughts After the Last Chord," featuring contrasted descriptions of Janet and the Queen of Faerie. I had difficulty getting the audio file for this one loud enough to hear at all, but I admit, I've never thought Tam Lin's take on the whole matter a particular mystery.
So that is one course I didn't find particularly appetizing, but the knot of salt and its attendant titles promise brine-flavored delicacies. The first is "The Selchie's Children's Plaint," by the legendary Jane Yolen. Though short and strongly allegorical, this is a poem that packs a punch, focusing on one of the more heartbreaking aspects of the selkie legend. At the same time, especially in light of the above poems, I remain fiercely glad the selkie found her skin and was at last free to make her own choice again, even if the choice was not what her children wished.
So it goes too for "The Changeling Maid" in Patricia Roy's poem, whose lover does not like the end result of a day at the beach because it makes them too alike. Again, I see echoes of the expectations of women, to be inspiration or bedrock, not yearning artist. The rhythms of this poem are rolling as the sea, dreamy and shifting right up until that last line, which is like the cliff against which the wave breaks. It's a powerful effect, whether read or heard, and the audio file is a treat.
After such a self-contained poem, Gemma Files' "The Drowned Town" is a sharp contrast, with its implicit expectation of familiarity with the tale of Ys. While an assumption of a shared body of knowledge among readers of speculative poetry is not unreasonable, I feel this piece would have been stronger with more groundwork laid in the body itself. As it is, there's a lot of breathtaking imagery, too much to quote any one set of lines, but it feels unanchored to a narrative to lend it significance beyond beauty.
Beauty is not lacking in the last of the banquet offerings, "Urashima Taro sings" by Francesca Forrest. Again, familiarity with a particular tale is assumed, but while this poem is much shorter than "The Drowned Town," it conveys much more of its own background. For me, the minimal approach of the format underscores a grief too large to express, which made the piece all the more poignant. I'd like to have heard it spoken, but either the icon for an audio file is misplaced, or the file itself has been devoured by goblins too greedy to share.
This is not the end of the feast, however, though it be the end of the courses. For all their greed, goblins do like to boast, and thus are two more dishes offered for the tasting. The first is "The Meek Shall Inherit..." by Delbert Gardner, a suitably mild title to lull one after a full meal. Be careful when you bite, however; this one contains worms, one of which might just squirm where your laughter lies, to free it as you will never be free, no, not now that you've tasted the fruit and give the goblins a morsel of their own.
Should you manage the worms without flinching, the true final dish is Anna Sykora's "Article of Faith," like a dark, piquant chocolate truffle to finish off both the meal and the day. I recommend setting it on your tongue and letting it melt to catch all the nuances of flavor, perhaps closing your eyes and listening to the audio file. After all, rest is advised after partaking of such rich food, and then you might go home refreshed.
Or you might not go home at all, but that's always a risk when accepting an invitation to a goblin feast from a gilled woman dripping seawater.
One of the things I love about Goblin Fruit is that there always seems to be a theme, but it's not a theme as easily identified as, say, "poems about water sprites" or "illusions." Appropriately, it tends to feel more like a gourmet meal, each poem a flavor in a given course, all chosen to complement each other and build toward the next course, until you end the meal full and half-dreaming and trapped forevermore Underhill, but I speak not of that as the Goblin Queens speak not of the Undertow.
The first thing to set the tone is the artwork, which gives one a hint of what's coming up. I miss Spring's seatheme, which was so tailor-made for me, but I adore the not-quite-pastel wide-gaping mouth of the rainbow creature that welcomes us to Summer. Click Enter, and why, there is an Imp to welcome you with an offering of richly-colored fruit (does it not look delectable? Surely one bite wouldn't hurt). Pay no attention to the sharp teeth above and below the Table of Contents. I am certain they are only for decoration. Admire instead the curlicues and whimsical near-hearts of the side borders. Delightful, no?
As always, the issue leads off with a Note from the Editors, this one to taunt indicate the issue was launched from Readercon. Also to indicate the availability of the first hardcopy volume available under the Goblin Fruit banner, the inaugural chapbook of a series to be called Fresh From the Vine: Demon Lovers and Other Difficulties, by Nicole Kornher-Stace, with artwork by that selfsame Oliver Hunter who graces the Goblin Fruit site with his visions, and a dual-voice poem rounded out by C.S.E. Cooney. Should either poet be unfamiliar to you, they are both conveniently featured in this issue of Goblin Fruit, and you can be sure you will gain my envy as well as their lovely poetry should you decide to spring for a copy of Demon Lovers Et Al. And while the envy of sea creatures is not a thing to court lightly, I would not blame you for considering it worth the cost in this instance (not that I would spare you, but nor would I blame you).
But to return to the issue at hand, our fine editrixes chose Nicole Kornher-Stace as Summer's feature poet, and in fact the poems featured are the self-same pieces (minus the collaboration with Mistress Cooney) that appear in the above-mentioned chapbook. So you can preview what you're getting, which is always handy. Given the title of the chapbook, it should be no surprise the four poems are focused on the trials and tribulations of taking up with an otherworldly creature. "This Is Not a Love Story" both does and doesn't lie in the title, the piece evoking numerous faery tales and the teetering of the heroines between punishment and reward for being active. The framing device is an older woman, grandmother or mother, lecturing a daughter. The language is plain-spoken, with the richness in the imagery, which is a style I particularly like. Which is not to say there's no cadence to the wording, a kind of oral storytelling quality that leads to solid emphasis on the lines "Girl, you read too much," and, "Girl, you dream too much," underscoring their poignancy. My only complaint is that there is no similar build-up in the final stanza, an echoing phrase on which to end. "The wherewithal to choose" is lovely and rounded, but doesn't quite carry that emotional punch.
"Janet Stands Her Ground Before the Queen" gets more specific than "This Is Not a Love Story," playing specifically with the ballad of "Tam Lin." While the title led me to expect Janet's viewpoint, in fact the poem is a sonnet wherein the Queen addresses Janet as she does Tam Lin at the end of the ballad. The content reminded me of another poem I read some twenty years ago, mentioning the inevitability of Janet's changing shape as she ages. Kornher-Stace makes excellent use of her form, with end-rhymes that feel natural even as they underline the formality of the Queen's words: she is not cursing Janet only because she doesn't need to. Janet's nature as a mortal creature has done that for her.
Mortals truly are disadvantaged in the world of demons, tricksters, and changelings, and "The Changeling Always Wins" is a fine example of how that works. A mother convinced her child is a Changeling would happily trade the mischievous creature for her true baby. Its fits and tantrums are alarming, and she considers other means of being rid of it,
Cut it open, turn its insides out?
What would I find?
A clockwork heart, a clot of earth,
a vein-fine plait of baby hair tied thrice,
which I might recognize?
(The long knives whisper darkly in their block.)
But, of course, the Changeling smiles, and thoughts of taking it apart are forgotten in the face of the possibility of a bond, and the hope that maybe this is her child after all. Hope and love, the way mortals feed monsters, monsters feed mortals, and poets feed readers (does it not look delectable? Surely one bite wouldn't hurt).
So the Changeling is fed and grows, to pass into an unlove story of its own. Or perhaps it's the same unlove story from whence it sprang. "The Demon Lover's Child Grows Up" seems clear enough on the cyclical nature of the monster in question, and his displeasure at being trapped in child form, thanks to a mortal love more clever than he'd intended. He's a seething, resentful creature, and now she haunts him as surely as he ever tormented her:
...I've debauched
priestesses, teased queens, caused empresses
to soak their silks, and dallied with more witches
than these pipsqueak brats have toes. And there you are,
you bitch, never quite out of mind: I cannot touch them
but you leap back out of memory, all mouth
and lap and arms, devouring
as rain....
It comes full circle, lover into mother, child grown to lover of another girl who is "waiting anyway. She calls it/trying for a baby. She says/she's hoping for a boy." A very powerful poem, with juicily vicious imagery and lovely rolling assonance.
Stepping back into the main Table of Contents with our appetites thus whetted, the first course set before us is presented under the verse to stitch your palm. The titles of the poems echo the idea of bindings, the sort that require blood. "Sumerian Love Song" by Mary Alexandra Agner lives up to that promise. There is a note under the by-line that the poem was "adapted from Samuel Noah Kramer's translation of BM24975," and the structure of the poem evokes an older one and the culture in which it flourished. The topic of the piece is the anticipated return of a longed-for lover, and the musical implications of the title certainly match the repetitions, like choruses, that characaterize the poem. For example:
He comes as a swallow
which never sets,
a dragonfly rising
over the water
and skimming the mist
over the water,
skimming the mountain-grass
floating on water.
This poem has an audio component. There's such a strong cadence in the written form, and that comes through clearly in the author's reading.
Among anticipated lovers returning falls the figure of Odyseuss, and "Penelope's Bed," by Karen Berry, addresses the woman who waited for him so long and faithfully, when faithful is not exactly a term that can be applied to the man himself. Luckily, while he has been dallying with Calypso and Circe, Penelope has found her own means of comfort and diversion, and while Odyseuss is still welcome in it ("Come to us, wanderer, come/to the roots, the wood, the bark"), there's some question about whether he'll ever be able to get out again.
Perhaps the bed has become acquaintances with "The Woman Giving Birth to Air," by Neile Graham, for "Head, arms, legs splayed, she's open to anything." The strength of this poem is the striking, almost steampunkish imagery of a woman who holds within herself the ability to conceive anything. There's a kind of breathless quality to the poem's structure, a tumbling down from a top-heavy line to begin each stanza, all the way down to the hard-edged two syllable last lines of each stanza. The author reads to emphasize that structure, the swollen possibilities of the woman, and the grounding of her in herself.
Alex Dally MacFarlane takes the stitching more literally in "Beautifully Mutilated, Instantly Antiquated." There's a refrain preceding listings of item and cost as in an antique shop, with each listing followed by a stanza that builds the picture of a heroine out of some lost, harrowing tale. While most of the poetic aspect of this piece seems imposed by form rather than intrinsic to phrasing, and line breaks seem primarily spaces to pause for breath, the language is still beautiful, and the shape of the thing on the page. Given the subject matter, that's a justifiable end unto itself.
From this stitching, we come to the implement: the thorn of roads, and the first of our wielders (or are they wielded against?) is a creature travelling, Shweta Narayan's "Apsara," first among the Sidhe, then to other mythologies. I saw some of the impetus for the creation of this poem, and it is aching and beautiful and lyric. There are too many gorgeous lines, but the refrain of "tones tones semitones" sticks with me, with its freight of bittersweet musicality. For me, this piece echoes off my migratory life as well as the distance between my homeland and those places from whence my ancestors and their folklore sprang. See what song it sings to you, and be sure not to miss the audio, the clear rage and longing of it.
Longing is a strong thread through the tale of True Thomas, one Neile Graham uses to bind "True Thomas at Secret Cove" tightly to the seastrand. There's wondrous imagery in this piece, which I wanted to love, but the style strikes me as too abrupt for enchantment. That may be the point; the enunciation in the audio file seems to bear this idea out, that the words are meant to call to mind the broken currents of water hitting jagged shoreline. Effective, then, if not my preference.
"Displaced" works better for me, again from the talented pen of Shweta Narayan. This one is very much rooted in the desert suburbs and swimming pools of Southern California, dry green and chlorine in the air, and a mix of cultures rubbing mythologies. This one is dialogue-heavy, and the cadences work to my mental ear, a few regional flavors sharpening each other at the edges, yet together giving a taste of the area. Narayan does a good job of intoning those flavors in the audio file, so that the nixie is influenced by the Valley dwellers she most likely hears on a regular basis, and Grandfather lizard sounds more like the landscape up I-15, a national forest of cactus and dunes.
Gale Acuff's "Secret Identity" wanders to the other side of the country and specifies a modern setting, Georgia of 1966. This could be a straightforward poem about a little boy who likes superheroes, picking a comic book to buy when there aren't many options available. There's a twist toward the end, though, the boy thinking "I've got a gal inside me somewhere/too, and I can let her out," and that deepens the concept and the title both. Like "Displaced," this poem's cadence is strongly regional, and it's a shame there's no audio file. I'd like to have heard it.
Luckily, there is an audio file to accompany C.S.E. Cooney's "Coyote Does Chicago." The setting of the title actually only applies in the first stanza, with the rest of the poem wandering back West. I can't help but read this as part of a series with "Cody Coyote" from the Spring issue, and both poems have a strongly chant-like quality, on which the audio files capitalize. It makes me curious (and hopeful) whether Autumn will bring a third adventure.
In Summer yet, the thorn splits the feast only for a new binding to be set. The next course's purpose is to lash your hip, though "Raqs Shaqi" by Joshua Gage acknowledges how dangerous the attempt at such a binding might be. Unfortunately, it's an acknowledgement from the outside, the ostensible subject of the poem objectified by language that focuses on external physicality rather than internal rhythm. I mentally compare it to fragments of poetry shared in the belly dancing communities of which I've been a part, and wish for deeper insights into the dancer's mind as part of future pieces on the topic.
Perhaps as a result of my dissatisfaction, Thomas Zimmerman's "The Sweet Hell Within" not only reads as commentary on the phenomenon of the male artist's tendency to position women as inspiration, muses, rather than arists in our own right, but it also reads as something of a critique of the preceding piece. I know this isn't possible as far as auctorial intention, but it says something about what I view as a strongpoint of Goblin Fruit: the careful placement of pieces to create a kind of dialogue with each other. Without this aspect, Zimmerman's piece is sharp and dark, but not terribly unusual, which in itself says something about perceptions of male and female creativity.
Alexis Vergalla's "Wolf and Girl" offers another perspective on the issue, in fact, making use of "Little Red Riding Hood" to address gender expectations, male predation, and how rare it is that "he is split/from navel to throat." Even the physicality of the description is rare, when women are frequently described in terms of their bodies. Food for thought, indeed, especially when taken with Anna Renz's "Tam Lin's Thoughts After the Last Chord," featuring contrasted descriptions of Janet and the Queen of Faerie. I had difficulty getting the audio file for this one loud enough to hear at all, but I admit, I've never thought Tam Lin's take on the whole matter a particular mystery.
So that is one course I didn't find particularly appetizing, but the knot of salt and its attendant titles promise brine-flavored delicacies. The first is "The Selchie's Children's Plaint," by the legendary Jane Yolen. Though short and strongly allegorical, this is a poem that packs a punch, focusing on one of the more heartbreaking aspects of the selkie legend. At the same time, especially in light of the above poems, I remain fiercely glad the selkie found her skin and was at last free to make her own choice again, even if the choice was not what her children wished.
So it goes too for "The Changeling Maid" in Patricia Roy's poem, whose lover does not like the end result of a day at the beach because it makes them too alike. Again, I see echoes of the expectations of women, to be inspiration or bedrock, not yearning artist. The rhythms of this poem are rolling as the sea, dreamy and shifting right up until that last line, which is like the cliff against which the wave breaks. It's a powerful effect, whether read or heard, and the audio file is a treat.
After such a self-contained poem, Gemma Files' "The Drowned Town" is a sharp contrast, with its implicit expectation of familiarity with the tale of Ys. While an assumption of a shared body of knowledge among readers of speculative poetry is not unreasonable, I feel this piece would have been stronger with more groundwork laid in the body itself. As it is, there's a lot of breathtaking imagery, too much to quote any one set of lines, but it feels unanchored to a narrative to lend it significance beyond beauty.
Beauty is not lacking in the last of the banquet offerings, "Urashima Taro sings" by Francesca Forrest. Again, familiarity with a particular tale is assumed, but while this poem is much shorter than "The Drowned Town," it conveys much more of its own background. For me, the minimal approach of the format underscores a grief too large to express, which made the piece all the more poignant. I'd like to have heard it spoken, but either the icon for an audio file is misplaced, or the file itself has been devoured by goblins too greedy to share.
This is not the end of the feast, however, though it be the end of the courses. For all their greed, goblins do like to boast, and thus are two more dishes offered for the tasting. The first is "The Meek Shall Inherit..." by Delbert Gardner, a suitably mild title to lull one after a full meal. Be careful when you bite, however; this one contains worms, one of which might just squirm where your laughter lies, to free it as you will never be free, no, not now that you've tasted the fruit and give the goblins a morsel of their own.
Should you manage the worms without flinching, the true final dish is Anna Sykora's "Article of Faith," like a dark, piquant chocolate truffle to finish off both the meal and the day. I recommend setting it on your tongue and letting it melt to catch all the nuances of flavor, perhaps closing your eyes and listening to the audio file. After all, rest is advised after partaking of such rich food, and then you might go home refreshed.
Or you might not go home at all, but that's always a risk when accepting an invitation to a goblin feast from a gilled woman dripping seawater.