Story Hour

Originally published by Doubleday (1963) and in 1982 by the University of Arkansas Press, Story Hour takes many well-known fairy tales -- Jack and the Beanstalk, Beauty and the Beast, Little Red Riding Hood -- and turns them on end. In this collection of poems, Sara Henderson Hay asks us to feel compassion for "the murdered Giant"; to believe that the grandmother might even invite the wolf in and offer him "a warm bed, and a bone or two"; and to walk along dark streets with a young man who has escaped the hard life inside the shoe but not his mother's reach. Hay's deft and efficient voice makes these familiar stories at times funny, always ironic, and, as Miller Williams writes in the foreword to this new version, "even scarier than they were."Hay manages the unexpected points of view in these poems through the sonnet. Using the turn, the shift in rhetoric on which the sonnet relies, she establishes and subtly undermines our notions of the fairy tales before giving us a completely new sense of them, sometimes more compassionate than they once were. Beauty, married to the new Prince, "thought of the good Beast, who used to walk / Beside her in the garden, and who had / Such gentle eyes, and such a loving arm / To shield her from the briers, and keep her warm."Whether these poems bring to the surface a joke we hadn't darkness only hinted at before, they always invite imagined, or quicken our memory to the us to go back into what Miller Williams calls "these old houses we thought we knew so well."