The Fox’s Wedding, Rebecca Hurst
The Emma Press, 2022 £10.00
Searching for keys
Everything about this pamphlet seems thoughtfully designed to evoke fairy tale. The poem titles tell us the territory: ‘Into the Woods’, ‘Hide and Seek’, ‘The Frog Prince’. Even the look — the illustrations (by Reena Makwana) and generous shape — suggests a child’s storybook. Then there’s the language, deceptively simple yet rich with folklore allusions and sounds that beg to be read aloud — like this, from ‘Hide and Seek’:
I chased them all — St Stephen’s freckled wren,
The Whitsun Man, John Barleycorn and his bride —
from first frost to leaf-fall, from cold moon to old.
But this is where the simplicity ends. Dark undertones are a feature of fairy tale, but Rebecca Hurst highlights them and explores the complex way folklore and fairy tale are imbedded in our psyche.
Nothing illustrates this better than ‘The Memetics of Fairy Tales’. Memetics: a reference to Darwinian theory and/or the study of memes? For me, the duality is key.
It begins with a familiar trope, ‘The locked door’, and takes us on a journey through a sequence of others: ‘The golden key’, ‘Midnight’, ‘An axe’, ‘A red cloak’. The sequence is repeated and augmented stanza by stanza, but then the order is unexpectedly changed, reversed or a one-off line appears: ‘The cottage in the forest’; ‘The crone at her spindle’.
Many are recurrent symbols given a contemporary twist in other poems. Take needles and pins in ‘The Art of Needlework’ (raising gender/identity issues), or ‘The Needle Prince’ (questioning stereotypical relationships). It’s richly referential. But in the end, everything comes back to the one thing — ‘The locked door’ — with which we began.
The frequent use of incantatory repetition in these poems is almost hypnotic and lured me in. But, although reminded of skipping chants, I was also aware of a complex idea being played out: the arrangement of lines in ‘The Memetics of Fairy Tales’ suggests the way that stories evolve and get handed down. Yet there remains the underlying core, the same tropes, that run through them all.
Whether this unlocks that door, I’m not sure: I found these poems easier to read than interpret.