Postcards from the Province of Hyphens

Sonya Taaffe

Sonya Taaffe is one of the modern masters of the written word. Why is this? It's somewhat hard to explain, mostly because great writers each have a particular greatness. In Taaffe's case, I think, what happens is that while her word choice strays from the path of normal conversation, it never strays far enough that one gets tangled up in one's own feet reaching for the dictionary; thus, one has the sensation of reading something out of the ordinary without going as far afield as, for example, one gets in some of Cormac McCarthy's novels. Combined with a slightly off-kilter (for Americans, anyway) sense of diction and grammar-- which comes, no doubt, from a number of years studying classical languages-- the overall effect is one of studying work in a foreign language, but being able to read it in one's native tongue. Assuming, of course, one's native tongue is English. (If it reads like this in other languages, without translation, then we've really got something for the papers.)

Taaffe is part of a new, as yet to my knowledge nameless, movement in the written word, one that blends fantasy (be it high, low, or anywhere in between) with that highbrow litt-rat-chaw stuff that most fantasists wouldn't be caught dead reading. This is nothing new; most recently, the horror-of-absence writers (the most notable being Kathe Koja and Lucius Shepard) trod this ground, and trod it well. What Taaffe and her contemporaries (Catherynne M. Valente being the name that comes most readily to mind) is that while Koja et al. work rather hard to keep their language in the gritty of the everyday, the industrial, Taaffe and co. reborrow the richness of the language of fantasy; where you'd not think of a Lucius Shepard story as a fantasy were it not to contain ghost ships, talking lizards, or the like, Taaffe's writing approaches a mythic quality simply on word choice, the allusions made and the like rather than the subject matter. While her subject matter normally does run to the fantastic, it doesn't always, and it's in these pieces where the momentum of the work can be seen; "Storm Gods of the Connecticut River Valley" is an obvious choice for an example.

"...Rain washes his spectacles,
patiently, in streams; his hair never
blows askew. Come closer, and carefully,
to hear what keeps wind and tempest tuned
and true: the low notes are thunder, and
all the thousand voices of the falling rain."
(--"Storm Gods of the Connecticut River Valley")

Postcards from the Province of Hyphens is ostensibly Taaffe's first collection of poetry, but this is belied both by the fact that Singing Innocence and Experience contains poetry and this volume contains a few very short pieces of fiction; when it comes right down to it, isn't the messing about with the genre of the very things contained in the book, no matter what the outside of it says, just another part of the, for lack of a better term, genre-crossdressing going on here?

This is, simply put, beautiful work. Those who are already fans of poetry, if you're not yet aware of Sonya Taaffe, you should be; those who have not yet glommed onto the fact that poetry is the living soul of society may want to go for Singing Innocence and Experience first. You'll still get a bit of poetry there, and it should convince you that, eventually, you want to read this book, as well. In either case, evetnaully, you will likely get round to reading this book, and you will find it worthy.