Another review that I was supposed to write over a month ago, but yeah, if you didn’t read my previous post or don’t follow me on Twitter the short version is that I moved to Japan, so I was quite busy. I finally set up a writing desk though, so from now on I’ll try to find a new (hopefully consistent) schedule.
Prequel to the review though: I brought this book to work with me almost everyday for the last two weeks hoping to start writing this during lunch break, and I read every poem so many times, and I’m still not tired of them.
***
To Fall Fable is a tale of mythology, fables, and melancholy, all in a package of beautifully crafted words.
The chapbook starts before Genesis, with Eve happy thanks to her sisters, the ribs—and how did no one ever think about this before, about an idea that seems almost obvious, the ribs as Eve’s sisters, as her companions in a world as it should be, as it isn’t?
The descent into Genesis shows Eve more than Adam, and a Paradise that’s lonely, that ignores Eve’s tears in a foreshadowing of what women’s experience will be for millennia to follow. Eve cried, at first, but that didn’t count, it says.
The poetry keeps its dream-like quality throughout the book, but it also becomes progressively more tragic.
Side note: it validates my theory that reading the best poetry hurts a bit.
Beautiful images adorn the whole chapbook, but one of my favourites appears towards the end, in one of the sonnets. I am a sucker for Greek mythology, so when I read you said no once and it turned you into / a tree. I literally gasped. It fits so well with the poem, and the reference is not only effortless, but also incorporated later on in the sonnet so that it doesn’t feel like a throwaway line.
Another thing I love is how well the crown of sonnets melts into each other, how the story unfolds slowly until the tragic, all too real conclusion. They’re difficult, sensitive topics to tackle, but Alice Wickenden does so magnificently, with tact but without hiding the truth, reminding us that the good and the horrible get mixed up at times, and it doesn’t take from either, it just makes it harder for us to accept both.