Singing Innocence and Experience

by Sonya Taaffe

The Devil's School lies down this way. Lot's wife knows your name. Hearts hang in the scales, flesh and clay are one and the same, and the severed head of Orpheus sings in winter waves. In award-winning poet Sonya Taaffe's first collection of short fiction, the boundaries between worlds dissolve to reveal unmasked harlequins and women made of stars, serpentine plagues and New England storm gods, and many other denizens of the spaces between. These songs of innocence and experience, Blake never knew.

Genres: Fantasy, Short Stories, Poetry, Fiction

272 pages, Paperback

First published June 7, 2005

Reviews

[Susan]

included in Realms of Fantasy Magazine June 2004

[Isidore · Rating 3 out of 5]

Several of the stories in this collection collapse through stylistic pretentiousness, an excess of swooning romanticism, or uninteresting characters. However, there are more than enough successes to warrant optimism about this writer's future. In some of the tales the characters struggle with pain that seems literary and artificial; but "Featherweight" is both grim and very poignant, as is "Shade and Shadow"(and the idea of using Homer's bloody means of summoning the dead as the basis for a modern horror/fantasy tale is absolutely brilliant). The ophidian horrors of "Letters from the Seventh Circle" are memorable; "Return on the Downward Road" is also excellent, and, like "Letters", is written with a relative economy of style which improves narrative clarity without diminishing imaginative power. But my favourite story is probably "Constellations, Conjunctions", a delirious and delightful astronomical fantasy only slightly marred by the prosaic unlikelihood that an amateur would ever be granted an academic teaching position, with or without the help of Nut.

[Bridgett · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked the themes in these stories -- mythology, tarot cards, the underworld, dreams, and so on. The stories and poems are beautifully written and I had to read them very carefully to understand. However, I still often felt confused and had to reread parts. A couple of my favorite stories were Innocence and Experience, because I love unicorns, and Moving Nameless, about Adam's nameless second wife. I hope to reread this collection someday and hopefully understand it better. The notes in the back do help a little.

[Genevieve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely, lyrical stories and poems––generally taking elements of myth and folklore and placing them in a more-or-less modern setting; some secondary-world stuff, too. Some bits are reminiscent of Patricia McKillip, and some bits run very close to my own imagination & writing.