The Poets' Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales - Softcover

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9781586540272: The Poets' Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1586540270 ISBN 13: 9781586540272

Publisher: Story Line Press, 2003

Writers and readers have long been inspired by the haunting wisdom and sheer imaginative power to be found in the fairy tales of the immortal Brothers Grimm. The editors have collected more than a hundred poems inspired by Grimm tales and written by our finest living poets. A brilliant and informative anthology, a teachable text.

Jeanne Marie Beaumont first book of poetry, Placebo Effects, was selected by William Matthews for the National Poetry Series in 1997. She teaches at Rutgers University. Claudia Carlson works at Oxford University Press in New York. Her poems have appeared in Heliotrope, Coracle, Space and Time, Fantastic Stories and NYCBigCityLit.comm

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From Introduction: These poems reveal the complex relationship that exists between contemporary poets and a received body of myth or lore. The Grimm tales are subject to a significant amount of skepticism, of refutation or "talking back," and of fracturing or breaking down. Yet an abiding, if irreverent, affection and appreciation for the tales, an acknowledgment of their continuing pull and metaphoric power also can be discerned. There is a mutual enrichment when poets become tale (re)tellers: the poets keep the stories current and fresh and give them back their original vivacity, rigor, and immediacy, while the stories enable the poets to tap into a vast and resonant source of symbol and cultural history. The tales become again "full of mystery like all living things," released from the confines of the nursery, rescued from ossification or sentimentalization, able again to fill us with wonder, dread, and delight.

From Booklist:

The German myths shrunken into children's tales with the coming of Christianity might have been lost with the arrival of the modern era were it not for the methodical and comprehensive work of brothers Jacob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm (1786-1859) Grimm and the latter's wife, Dortchen Wild, source of many stories, who is rarely credited. The archetypal power of the stories, especially those with female protagonists, has induced many poets to employ their themes, motifs, and characters. This ample collection stresses the utility of the Grimm tales to women who, like Anne Sexton, Carol Ann Duffy, and Lucille Clifton, find in these "old wives' tales" a repository of strong feminine imagery. But the figures and plots of the tales are too complex to countenance poets who would use the stories for mere polemics, and so the poets at hand include Galway Kinnell and Denise Duhamel, Randall Jarrell and Olga Broumas, Jane Yolen and Allen Tate. A strong, readable, uniformly high-quality anthology. Patricia Monaghan
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