The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison by Maggie Smith

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison by Maggie Smith Alyse Bensel Maggie Smith. The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison. Tupelo Press, 2015. The modern fairy tale can be difficult to tell, especially when facing the pitfalls of rehashing old ground or slipping into cliché. But Maggie Smith’s poetry collection The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison resists such urges. Rather, these poems invoke the trappings—and frankly, the dangers—of a modern fairy tale while circumnavigating cliché with skill. Smith’s fully realized collection shies away from romanticizing the grotesque and triumphant aspects of such stories. Instead, she grips onto the dangers in these precautionary poems. When crossing a burning bridge in “Suspension,” the speaker provides a warning in an instructional string of advice: “Once you cross, as you must, / you cannot go back.” During the crossing, one must “Whittle yourself to transparency. Cross the bridge as it burns, sparks / in the wisps of your hair.” All anyone can do is move forward on the literal, and metaphorical, burning bridge, which takes on both a fantastical and very realistic materiality. If one does not move, one will be consumed. Throughout this collection, the modern and the fable continue this meeting through landscape. The fairy tale forest merges with the Midwestern landscape, like in “Ohio,” where “The landscape sings in you like a dial tone,” flat and unending in the speaker’s childhood memory. Although the memories are pleasant, the speaker reminds the reader of both the happiness in reminiscing and what isn’t remembered or occurs outside memory: This place raised you as one of its own: blue as ink and almost as useful; sturdy and good with your hands. But there’s darkness you’ve never seen, not even through your eyelids. The land may have given the speaker steadfast abilities, but there is something more to the past, more to the land where one grew up. That unknowable—or yet to be known—aspect imparts a sense of dread. And in that darker vein, “Forest Lanterns” illuminates the “banished dead” who haunt the forest, existing on what little the forest has to offer. “The stories say they have no hearts. That they wear / the broken bodies they left in,” the speaker narrates, unfolding the hushed horrors of these lives lived in the periphery of humanity. At any time, misfortune [End Page 61] may cast off comforts, leaving one with nothing, or barely anything. Among the natural world’s looming, and sometimes reassuring, presence, are many children: daughters and sons who are always potentially lost. Such fears grip the speaker in “If I Forget to Tell You,” where the speaker asks the daughter to be vigilant in the face of easy traps that exist in fairy tales and fables, like empty cottages. But, above all, the daughter must keep language alive, even if it is only a word: “choose a word and let it live // alone in your mouth for a while. Pears, pears, pears. / Sometimes there isn’t room for more.” Or, in “First Son,” a woman desires a son after twelve daughters, taking drastic measures to ensure his existence. As the twisted tale progresses, the son, when grown, discovers the sins of his parents, although “he’s too late” for his sisters “aren’t girls anymore but wild, winged // creatures, their eyes black as the eyes of crows.” Nothing is left to forgive, as the abandoned have grown feral, beyond the reach of those who love, or may have loved, them. Steeped in regret, Smith’s poems act as both fable and as an alternative to fable, where people can make better decisions or learn how to reckon with those decisions. While not necessarily offering right or wrong guidance, the imperative is clear: life is full of regret, but the future can be brighter. Certainly more Grimm than Disney, but more preoccupied with the safety and lives of children than delighting in their demise or misfortune, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison imparts this wisdom to the reader, imploring caution in a world full of invisible dangers. But the world also can carry its own joys if one knows where to...