And If I Go With Child? is a poetry collection by Charlotte Hussey reimagining the medieval Scottish Border Ballad of Tam Lin as an initiation into Faery. Here she interweaves Janet’s ‘coming of age story’, ‘her sensual, sexual and imaginative awakening’ with her own in a sequence of poetic collages set across place and time structured around lines from the ballad.

In her biography Charlotte speaks of ‘growing up on a sand bar fronted by the Atlantic and backed by a tidal marsh’ and some of the narrative is set in these landscapes. The descriptions are rich showing Charlotte’s knowledge of the ecology of the land, particularly its plants, sweet grass, marsh rose, many more.

The first section tells of Janet going to Cautherhaugh wood where it is rumoured girls might lose their maidenhead. Here Charlotte describes a surprise encounter with a man which would spook any woman anywhere at any time.

‘A bush shakes a man out of it.
He’s stubby as a rough root.
His face is overgrown with hair
and shadows. His back bends
under bundle tied with a vine.’ 

Is he a lurker? A rapist? A mythic woodwose bringing his own dangers? In this instance he leaves nothing but a bundle and we’re left with guilt at our assumptions.

One of the prominent features of this book is Charlotte’s unique and original descriptions of the characters as they are summoned into our times. Janet begins stiff-laced with ‘plucked eyebrows’, ‘forbidden lipstick’ and ‘a starched white / secretarial blouse’ but this apparel is swiftly undone by the wind.

We first find Tam perching on a van on a cliff top looking over a beach (a deliberately liminal position). At first he appears ordinary and in now way fae.

‘His barely zit-free chin bristles
with a don’t-tread-on-me beard.
My mannish boy! A green sweatshirt
rumples under his armpits.
Thrift store jeans…’

Yet it isn’t long until he becomes more sinister. ‘Eyes / stare, sucked like eggs from their shells / by a snake side-winding through his drug-laced / mind.’

The Faery Queen is deftly described crowned in honeysuckle, ‘almost beautiful’, ‘small lips a bit tight, / tiny nostrils like dark / pinholes against the white’. In accordance with the ballad she’s cruel and punishing, plucking out eyes and putting them in trees and stuffing mouths with moss. An Ice Queen who can strike one dumb and kill with her ‘blighting breath’.

‘Annunciation Dream’ clevery brings together Janet’s impregnation by Tam with Mary’s by depicting her in the ‘crown of 12 stars’ from the Book of Revelations. Janet’s realising she goes with child is subtly written and her attempt to abort, with Pennywort, is wrapped up in nature imagery.

Apocalyptic imagery features again strongly later on in the collection where it is brought together with the appearance of the Faery Riders in the Wild Hunt on Halloween. In a stroke of genius Charlotte sets this at Miles Gas Station, interweaving the ordinary and extraordinary in this liminal setting. 

‘Red Pegasus has faded
and fled this Mobil gas
station, leaving his winged
trace on a worn sign.
Twin pumps go on
guarding their lonely island,
where slack rubber hoses
hang useless as a bridle
not buckled up in time.’

A guitarist ‘clad in a long black / coat, preacher or gunslinger’ summons the hunt.

‘Their hurling
mass sucks fire from the stars
they pass, whooping, riding
hard across the fenceless,
Great Plains of the Sky.

Gutted pumpkins sputter
and glare. Dogs howl.’

The black, brown and white horses from the ballad take on an apocalyptic apparel with Tam, on his white horse ‘vast inside and out’, ‘a rider condensing as if / in an alembic, / unkempt, sun-struck, dazed.’

Janet’s rescue of Tam from captivity on the hunt of the Faery Queen is followed by the famous scene ‘hold me close and fear me not’ where she must keep tight hold of him as he shifts through a series of forms. Charlotte reimagines this cleverly with a ‘pet store girl’ wrestling a snake amongst the tanks and ‘a naughty circus girl’ embracing him as a lion. 

When he becomes a gleed she thrusts him into a well and he is returned as a knight in a poem that uses the alchemical symbolism of the wedding of Sol and Luna. Alchemical imagery occurs earlier in the verses about the horses – ‘A horse head’s a rebis / alchemists say you can fashion / into anything you want.’ This fits with the collection’s mercurial antagonists and the overall feel. 

Safe and wrapped in Janet’s green mantle Tam becomes the vulnerable one. ‘On the first of a cool November, / he shivers, clutching his crotch.’ At once a child and an old man. ‘Is he 21 or 990 years old / like the withered Children of Lir?’

Charlotte speaks of this ballad as ‘a story of captivity and liberation by way of redemptive love.’ It’s deliberately left ambiguous whether Tam’s impregnation of Janet constitutes rape. The reader is left to make their own mind up on the matter and, whatever the case, whether they could love Tam, hold him tight, bring him back. Working with, reimagining, imaginally experiencing these mysteries is all part of the initiatory process.

At the outset Charlotte leaves the question of whether she has been initated into Faery to her readers. On the basis of the magic and visionary impact of her words and their retention of the tale’s mystery I would give a resounding ‘yes’.

And If I Go With Child? is available from Ritona Press HERE.