Transformations (1971)

Anne Sexton retells seventeen Grimm fair tales. Essentially, each story is the same, except they are not. Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger and wakes up 100 years later with a Prince's kiss. Red meets a wolf who cross dresses in her Grandmother's cloths and then gobbles her up, only to be released later by a passing hunter. And so on.

What makes each retelling unique to Sexton are two things. First, each poem/tale is first introduced with a kind of preface, the author's poetic commentary that introduces the tale she's about to retell. Secondly, she uses modern flare to the metaphor used to describe and detail the tales. The thirteenth witch in "Birar Rose" (Sleeping Beauty) has "eyes burnt by cigarettes" and her "uterus is an empty tea cup". Snow White has "china-blue doll eyes" and Cinderella "walked around looking like Al Jolson."

The lines are simple and clean, plain lines, like the original tales she's retelling, but reading them you find there's something more, as though you've just spotted something out of the corner of your eye while walking in the woods. It's wonderful, and I want to keep it always, so that I can come back to it again and again. ( )

In this collection of poetry, Anne Sexton retells seventeen Grimm fairy tales.

I adore fairy tale revisions. I gobble it up as fast as I can. I especially love revisions that are darker and more sensual than the original tales (although that’s hard to do; the original Grimm stories were pretty bleak stuff). Anne Sexton’s poems certainly fit that bill.

She has a pattern. She usually starts each poem with a prologue about general life which then segues into the actual tale. Thus, in each poem, there are actually two stories: the frame and the tale-within-a-tale. It’s a clever use of meta narrative and works really well with the collection’s theme of fairy tales.

Sexton’s language is tricky, sharp, and utterly memorable. She has such perfect metaphors that each one of them is a little masterpiece in and of itself. Her fairy tales are both a homage to the original Grimm versions but with a mixture of the modern and the personal. They bite, and that’s a good thing.

Also worth mentioning is Kurt Vonnegut’s fantastic preface. He explains poetry better than I can. ( )

The winner of the Pulizter Prize for poetry, this short collection contains 17 poems based on tales from The Brothers Grimm collection. It includes classics such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Rumplestiltskin, Rapunzel, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel and Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty). Each poem is prefaced with a short, almost seperatepoem, that looks at the tale in a more modern setting. The main body of the poem is her actual re-telling of the tale.

Dark overtones to most of the poems, they are dry and witty with insightful comments from Sexton along the way. They are a very intimate look inside the mind of the author with much of her personal thoughts exposed on various subjects along the way. I don't read much poetry generally but this made me want to pick up more and in paritcular some Slyvia Plath who has a similar background and personal history.

My favourite was Little Red Riding Hood which has a section on moder decievers that made me think. It's quite sad reading the poems however knowing that she killed herself 3 years after this collection was first published. There are lots of references to therapy, depression, ECT (electro convulsive therapy) and medication which strike the reader all the more for knowing what happens next. Overall a beautiful, dark collection of fairy tale inspired poems all lovers of poetry and fairy tales will enjoy. ( )

poems: The Gold Key / Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs / The White Snake / Rumpelstiltskin / The Little Peasant / Godfather Death / Rapunzel / Iron Hans / Cinderella / One-Eye, Two-Eyes, Three-Eyes / The Wonderful Musician / Red Riding Hood / The Maiden Without Hands / The Twelve Dancing Princesses / The Frog Prince / Hansel and Gretel / Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty)

This collection contains Sexton's poetic reworkings of several unexpurgated Grimms' fairy tales. Allusions to 20th-Century life and culture, which might normally be jarring in the context of a fairy-tale retelling, actually work to show the timelessness of certain folkloric sensibilities. The poems tend toward the psychologically dark and sexual; Swan's illustrations, too, are very...vulviform. Before reading this book, my exposure to Sexton was pretty limited; I thought it made sense to start with subject matter that appeals to me (i.e., fairy tales). ( )

I don't really know where to start with this collection of poetry by Anne Sexton. I liked it, but I'm not sure why or what to say about it. I'm a virtual poetry novice and don't really feel qualified to critique it. From the blurb on the back of the book, "The poems collected in this astonishing volume are reenactments, parodies, what Anne Sexton described as transformations, of seventeen Grimm fairy tales. . ." The first poem is The Gold Key. I've never heard of a fairy tale by this name, and I'm not sure if this is a retelling of a fairy tale or not. It almost seems to me as if this is an introductory poem by Sexton describing what she's going to do with the rest of the poems in the collection. See what you think.

The Gold Key
The speaker in this case
is a middle-aged witch, me --
tangled on my two great arms,
my face in a book
and my mouth wide,
ready to tell you a story or two.
I have come to remind you,
all of you:
Alice, Samuel, Kurt, Eleanor,
Jane, Brian, Maryel,
all of you draw near.
Alice,
at fifty-six do you remember?
Do you remember when you
were read to as a child?
Samuel,
at twenty-two have you forgotten?
Forgotten the ten P.M. dreams
where the wicked king
went up in smoke?
Are you comatose?
Are you undersea?
Attention,
my dears,
let me present to you this boy.
He is sixteen and he wants some answers.
He is each of us.
I mean you.
I mean me.
It is not enough to read Hesse
and drink clam chowder
we must know the answers.
The boy has found a gold key
and he is looking for what it will open.
This boy!
Upon finding a nickel
he would look for a wallet.
This boy!
Upon finding a string
he would look for a harp.
Therefore he holds the key tightly.
Its secrets whimper
like a dog in heat.
He turns the key.
Presto!
It opens this book of odd tales
which transform the Brothers Grimm.
Transform?
As if an enlarged paper clip
could be a piece of sculpture.
(And it could.)
I like the idea of the gold key as a metaphor, admitting the reader into new worlds through books and storytelling. Sexton transforms all of the most famous fairy tales, including Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Hansel and Gretel, and Little Red Riding Hood. She also includes some that are lesser known (at least to me), such as Iron Hans, The Maiden without Hands, The White Snake and others. For the most part, she begins each fairy tale with a poem about the fairy tale and then gives a version of the fairy tale. I apologize if that doesn't make much sense, but that's what she does. In many cases, these fairy tales are even darker than the original tales. Sexton also interjects much of her own feelings and life into the tales, as well. Sexton suffered from depression for most of her life and committed suicide in 1974 just seven years after winning the Pulitzer Prize.
I read this book as part of The Year of Reading Dangerously, and I'm glad I did. Even though I haven't always been successful with my reading challenges, I'll keep joining them for this reason -- it forces me to read books that I would never have picked up otherwise. I really did enjoy this book of poetry even though I find it difficult to describe. However, after reading the foreword to this edition by Kurt Vonnegut I feel somewhat better about my lack of ability to describe these poems. He says, "How do I explain these poems? Not at all. I quit teaching in colleges because it seemed so criminal to explain works of art. The crisis in my teaching career came, in fact, when I faced an audience which expected me to explain Dubliners by James Joyce. I was game. I'd read the book. But when I opened my big mouth, no sounds came out." So, as you can see, I'm in good company. ( )