Editorial
From my earliest memory, fairy tales have fired my imagination. Whenever I came upon a wardrobe, there was the possibility of a door at the back of it; in any woods, the promise of a talking rabbit, a magic tree. American novelist and essayist Eudora Welty writes, ‘It had been startling and disappointing to me to find that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass.’ Even as a child I understood that the stories held not only magic, but important lessons. Tasting the candied gingerbread house might carry a risk of being eaten alive, but surely such risks must be taken if we are to find out who we are.
In selecting poems for Issue Four of The Marrow—our first anniversary issue—we were struck by how often the stand-out poems, the ones that changed something in us or moved us most, were steeped in the magical, supernatural and folkloric. These poems inhabit the spaces between things—not only the covers of a child’s book, but other in-between places where the veil is thinnest between this world and the other: a hospital ward, a forgotten toybox, a circus sideshow, an abandoned shed. Or the kind of places (to quote Irish poet Derek Mahon) ‘where a thought might grow’, where a broody hen might lay her precious eggs, where hawthorn, gorse and strawberries run wild, or where a moth might sip nectar from the deepest bud.
These poems have a sense of something older, bigger and more mysterious than anything we can imagine, something beyond the human condition. From Debbie Lim’s ‘When I Was an Inland Sea’, we are transported to ‘a time before seasons… a time before language and fear, before wild and tamed’. At the other threshold, Ronald Araña Atilano reassures us in ‘Seeds’ that ‘When the ice melts, the beheaded stems will grow again.’
Issue Four also considers the gaps in the story, the elegies for lost cosmologies. Robert Russell’s ‘Fish Inside Fish’ and berni m janssen’s ‘a blackberry story’ artfully explore the lessons of colonisation and migration, while Edie Popper’s ‘Snakeskin’ and Sarah Meehan’s ‘Afterlife’ offer both animal and human takes on the anthropocene. Mortality is never far from these poems: Fiona Larkin’s ‘All in the Balance’ left us gloriously dizzy, while Rebecca Goss’s depiction of a child’s first brush with death made us weep.
Vladimir Nabokov writes in his Lectures on Literature, ‘The three facets of the great writer—magic, story, lesson—are prone to blend in one impression of unified and unique radiance, since the magic of art may be present in the very bones of the story, in the very marrow of thought.’ Issue Four offers you witches and fairies, grotesque scarecrows and dolls with dark inner lives; here are the ghost-skins of snakes, dead fish heads, wolves disguised as little girls. As Nabokov so aptly puts it, ‘Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.’
We hope that in curating poems for Issue Four of The Marrow we’ve held that prism to the light and shaken out the rewards of magic, story and lesson—the essence, the marrow, of good art, good poetry.
Audrey Molloy, co-editor
