In his (in?)famous book, The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim analyses classic fairy tales through the lens of Freud. He posits that the darker elements of these tales, now scrubbed and sparkled over by Disney, actually served to help children grapple with existential problems such as separation anxiety, oedipal conflict, and sibling rivalry.
I read The Uses of Enchantment about eleven years ago, in the first year I moved to New York. Ever since I found two heavy volumes of Grimm’s Fairy Tales illustrated by Arthur Rackham on the shelf of my grandmother’s library, I’ve been a fairy tale fan—the real ones, that is, with their gruesome endings intact and un-Disneyfied. Bettelheim’s take, I found, was a little dated—Freudian analysis doesn’t hold up quite as well these days as it did in 1976, but I do think that Bettelheim got the basic idea right: Fairy tales do help children cope with darkness within the world and within their own lives.
Donika Kelly’s collection of poems, Bestiary, is one such tale. Like many fairy tales, it begins with someone who is lost. “You have been lost for some time / taking comfort in being home / to any wandering thing,” she intones in the collection’s first poem, “Out West.” Who is this “you” to whom she is speaking? Perhaps me, the reader, though I get the sense that the speaker is speaking to herself, telling herself a story. And yet, to use the second person suggests that our speaker is split, somehow separated or distanced from herself.
In her poem “Fairy Tale Logic,” A.E. Stallings states that all fairy tales contain an impossible task for the protagonist. I haven’t tested this statement against every single fairy tale, but it sounds solid to me—the princess in Rumplestiltskin had to spin a room full of hay into gold; Jack must escape the giant; Little Red Riding Hood must outwit a wolf. The end of “Out West,” gives us a clue to what its protagonist’s impossible task might be, “Do not wander,” the penultimate line commands—a difficult undertaking for a lost soul.
“You think about being small,” Kelly writes in “Catalogue,” the second poem, before launching into a series of autobiographical poems. Next, in “Fourth Grade Autobiography,” we learn she grew up in L.A., was in fourth grade the year of the riots in ’92, and that her parents hosted dance parties on Saturday night. But she drops a few breadcrumbs, clueing the reader in that all may not be right, “I believe in the devil,” she confesses.
The following poem, “Where she is opened. Where she is closed.” takes the shape of some of the more troubling tales in the Grimms’ selection. The speaker describes a man who hollows out a female body, climbs inside, and insist she carry him, “He is the heart now, / the lungs and stomach she can’t live without.” But just as we’re puzzling over this, the poems that follow leap from one form to the next—speaker as chimera, as Hermit Thrush, as block of ice, as door. She identifies with the bower bird in a series of poems, but then becomes swallow, becomes Pegasus, as if she cannot bear to stay in one body, her own.
“Handsome is” comes just before the longest poem in the collection. It is sort of a twin to “Where she is opened. Where she is closed.” In it, the speaker describes a dream in which her father hides in the bodies of other men, she tries to escape him by building a room around him, but “he picks all the locks;” she runs, transforming like Daphne, “I am a forest./ I am a field.”
By now, we are prepared for the revelation that comes in “How to be alone,” the long poem that stands at the center of the book: The speaker was a victim of childhood sexual abuse perpetrated by her own father. “How to be alone” chronicles the practices she’s developed to cope with the trauma, “Become invulnerable in holding, on everybody,/ your eye, roving, restless,” “Crumple the S of your body until / you resemble a ball of paper,” stay on the couch, safe between the warmth of two dogs. It is a kind of peace, snug with “the small, rough dogs,” that “lie at your feet or warm your belly,” but it is a peace that comes at the cost of human companionship. The speaker is still distanced from herself, “You continues to become her,” she admits, “a misfiring of the keyboard.”
In the next poem “Whale,” the speaker assures the reader that, like Jonah, our protagonist meets transformation, “she does not remain / behind the baleen forever.” From this point forward, the grinding stasis we felt in the first half of the book begins to loosen. Our speaker has stayed in the belly of her trauma and now fights her way to the surface.
One of my favorite poems in Bestiary is “Ceremony at the end of a season.” It is strange and unlike the other poems in the collection. “The season / was winter,” our speaker tells us,
“The sky filled the branches
with water.
The wind filled the branches
with ice.
The sun filled the branches
with light. “
Here we have that classic fairy tale trope—the rule of three. In the second half of the poem, the speaker comes in—no longer a you, but now an active “I”:
“I gnarled and gnashed
the tree.
I crushed my tongue
in the knotted bark.
I filled the buckets
with salt
from my own
body.
I buried them
beneath the tree.”
She matches the three former lines with three actions of her own—in fairy tales, A.E. Stallings says, “You must fight magic with magic.” Whatever this counter-curse is, it culminates in our speaker burying salt from her own body. But to bury something can also be to plant something.
In the next poem, “Ostrich,” Kelly introduces the word “we,” and suddenly the speaker is not so all alone. In a series of love poems, we see the speaker, or the nature of her love, transform into different beasts, as if she is trying on all kinds of shapes to find one that fits. It isn’t until Love Poem: Donika that she begins to inhabit herself in human form.
“I am no good at bearish things.
Fish or forage, my hands
are too small and slow to clip
the salmon thick in the heat
of spawn.”
Here, we can see her, looking down at her own hands that she’s treated as paws for so long, and realizing they are not made to grapple with the lifestyle she has been living. “I am tired of mounting / this hill alone,” she laments.
For me, the image that comes first to mind here is that of the Beast in Beauty and the Beast. In this moment she seems to see herself as she really is for the first time—not a bear, not a beast, but a lonely woman trying to overcome trauma and loss. She asks, “Love, how do I gain / what was lost in the winter?”
The remainder of the poems in the collection seem to be an answer to that question. In the penultimate poem, “Love Poem,” the transformations that had seemed so painful and loaded throughout the collection recur, but this time, there is a sense of lightness and play—as if the speaker has not shed her other selves, but incorporated them in order to become whole.
Kelly’s use of the speculative to reveal difficult truths and to put words to the mysterious process of recovery that survivors go through is, in a word, brilliant. It does feel like transforming into a thousand different animals, and not all of those transformations are “good”—How many survivors find themselves stuck in the shape of a monster or a mouse? Fairy tales may teach children how to behave in the world, but they also teach us to be brave. They reveal the ways in which we can have agency over the blue beards, the big bad wolves, and the wicked witches of the world. And while, as the Grimm Brothers surely knew, there are no “Happily ever afters,” for Donika Kelly, the end is but another road that is “a winding one,” and a wind that is, “a drying one.”
Laura Linart 