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A reader must respect the writer. To set words down and to take exceeding care of which words to use and how to place them is an activity that requires bravery and endurance of heroic proportions. But it is possible to labor greatly to little effect.
Reviewed by Bob Williams
 A Story of Witchery
by Jennifer Calkins
Les Figues Press
2006, ISBN 0-9766371-4-6, $15.00, 167 pages
Tell me where is fancy bred,
Or in the heart or in the head?
This is a fair question when we are confronted with a book of poetry that has none of the obvious qualities of poetry; when the lines, set in the short lines that we perceive as characteristic of free verse, are not only prose but prosy. Poetry must have a voice, prose may have a voice, but it is not one to which we must attend. The voice of A Story of Witchery is high pitched, somewhat strained, and devoid of many of the inflections that we expect in a fully human voice.
The author, Jennifer Calkins, has had a chapbook published prior to A Story of Witchery and her poems have appeared in a number of publications. She is also an evolutionary biologist.
The heroine of Witchery is Emily, a little girl with a cleft palette whose totemistic allies in her battle with a doctor and other assorted villains (like parents) are an ant, a wren, and a deer. The conflict between her and her enemies takes the form of recast fairy tales. There is a hint of Alice the forbidden door of Bluebeard’s castle, the dwarves from Snow White and a mermaid. Since the mermaid is a villain, it is difficult to determine if she is Hans Christian Andersen or Disney’s. The poem, divided into many short sections with old-fashioned explanatory headings, recounts all the misfortunes of Emily’s life. She was abandoned in a dumpster, she was subjected to a brutal operation by a doctor described as a butcher, and she appears to be condemned to relive all these horrors in a series of dreams, all of which are, except for the happy ending, nightmares steeped in blood and bodily fluids, all of this described with a very clinical vividness.
A reader must respect the writer. To set words down and to take exceeding care of which words to use and how to place them is an activity that requires bravery and endurance of heroic proportions. But it is possible to labor greatly to little effect. I found Witchery to be most unbewitching. Its episodes lack any sense of necessity and in a work where anything can happen, nothing that happens can be any better or more convincing than any other of the multitude of possibilities.
The book itself – like all those of Les Figues Press – is elegantly shaped with artwork of distinction.
About the Reviewer: Bob Williams is retired and lives in a small town with his wife, dogs and a cat. He has been collecting books all his life, and has done freelance writing, mostly on classical music. His principal interests are James Joyce, Jane Austen and Homer. His book Joyce Country, a guide to persons and places, can be accessed at: http://www.grand-teton.com/service/Persons_Places
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