Rachel Dacus writes ‘I would say that magical realism in poetry (and fiction) removes the argument of “likeness”. It plunges the reader straight into an altered world, offering only mystery as a doorway. It isn’t always an easily entered door, but once you walk through, things have changed. Life has changed for you.’1 Zoe Brooks uses all of these devices and more to create a superbly, dark narrative in her new collection Something in Nothing. Brooks is an assured storyteller whose work is steeped in the oral tradition.
This collection weaves characters from various fairy tales in a contemporary setting. The roots of the original tales remain but surface and grow into scenarios of good and evil we can all recognise. The garden is used throughout as a metaphor for a society fighting decay and desperately trying to keep things alive.
Key characters, in the book, include Bluebeard. The original tales have him murdering numerous wives, Brooks portrays him as a modern serial killer. One of the collection’s chilling refrains is, as in ‘Bluebeard’s House’: ‘This is the house / Up the steps – one, two, three.’:
No one notices them in café or street.
They are storm water in the gutter.
Easy come, easy gone, these girls.
(‘Bluebeard Likes to Entertain’)
Violence against women is addressed throughout and I was reminded of Safia Elhillo’s poem ‘Men Follow Me’ ‘with their tongues out / with their teeth shining like flies.’2
In an interview Brookes revealed that such a man had murdered a school friend. This information, as well as deeply moving, sent even more shivers down my spine. Another sinister character is Baba Yaga, the Slavic witch. Her equally evil activities evoked contemporary horrors such as the holocaust, ‘Baba Yaga’s Cottage Is’ ‘She relieves them of glasses / and false teeth’:
And in the villages all around
They will tell you that trains do not pass
Day and night with closed wagons
(‘Baba Yaga’s Cottage’)
Another overriding theme in the book is ‘otherness’. Beauty and the Beast are an aging couple and Beast has a sense for danger that Beauty doesn’t comprehend because he has experienced cruelty. The Woman, portrayed as a refugee, is worldly and knowing. She has had to flee her home with what she could carry:
Hers contained her father’s notebooks
her sewing kit and seeds
from her grandmother’s garden
(‘What They Took with Them’)
‘Grandmother’s Beans’ explains that ‘Each bean carries persecution with it…Each bean carries a life within it’.
In ‘Baba Yaga’s Cottage’ ‘…Baba Yaga has / – something that is nothing.’ ‘Bluebeards Cellar’ contains ‘A silence that is something’. Something in Nothing is a story of evil in plain sight. Brooks uses lines that are short and punchy in poems that are largely visceral but the collection is not without hope. The extended metaphors and blunt tone are reminiscent of Alberto Rios. In his poem ‘We are of a Tribe’ he writes ‘We plant seeds in the ground / And dreams in the sky,’ And later in the poem ‘ The dream of sky requires no passport. / Blue will not be fenced. Blue will not be a crime’.3 The lighter characters such as The Woman and The Luminous Girl offer this hope:
The luminous girl,
strong arms, strong legs,
leans back, pushes forward.
She is elegance and firm grace.
(‘The Swing’)
Even though in ‘The Storm’ ‘The storm has its fingers around the girl’s neck’. We travel ‘Towards the Light’ as ‘After the storm the river is / a rope of many colours…and silver becomes white / where river becomes the sun’. I recommend you take this journey through all its darkness and find the light we all need right now.
1 https://racheldacus.net/2024/02/magical-realism-in-poetry-louise-gluck/
2 https://www.wintertangerine.com/lom-elhillo-men-follow-me
3 https://poets.org/lesson-plan/teach-poem-when-there-were-ghosts-alberto-rios
Something in Nothing can be purchased here.
Sue Johns’s publications include Hush (Morgan’s Eye Press, 2011) , Rented, Poems on Prostitution and Dependency (Palewell Press, 2018) and Track Record (Dempsey & Windle, 2021). She has an MA in Writing Poetry from Newcastle University/ The Poetry School.