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'Something In Nothing' by Zoe Brooks: A Book Review

   


Something In Nothing

Zoe Brooks

 

Perhaps the fairy tales you were told at bedtime ended with and they all lived happily ever after. Stories in which the perils were overcome, and the moral was outlined clearly at the end.

 

When Zoe Brooks addresses the reader in her poetry collection Something In Nothing, she is quick to warn us that here things do not end neatly and cleanly. As the answers tell us in Happy Ever After – A Catechism we know not to “rely on breadcrumbs” and “when midnight strikes to hurry home”, but true to the original versions of fairy tales Brooks shows us the darker side, where “when a shoe does not fit cut off your toe”.

 

The characters chosen for this book weave in and out of the pages as we peer through different lenses. Bluebeard’s Garden has us watching Bluebeard’s new wife carrying out tasks in the garden and sighing because “Nothing lives long in Bluebeard’s garden”. In Cathedral we too feel the chill as the girl recognises that “there is a devil in the choir of angels”, and we, as readers, shudder at the horror of “wagons to be emptied, ovens to be stoked” in Endless Consumption.

 

The observational simplicity of fairy tale story telling is used to excellent effect in all the Baba Yaga poems and I found myself rereading these as a single sequence after reading this collection. There is a tightness here that strips things right back enabling the reader to hear the story, and watch the narrative unfold whilst all the time knowing the happy ever after is not on its way.

 

When we look here, we are shown ashes and dust. When we listen, we hear the echoes of words unsaid and warnings unheeded. We know there is something lurking in the shadows, that threatening things are behind us and also in plain sight. Something in Nothing is a book of hagstones, and unoiled hinges that has us looking to see what is hidden in all kinds of darkness.

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