Poems, much like fairy tales, are a slippery medium. There isn’t any one “right” way to read a poem, or to interpret a fairy tale. In a form with so many layers and overtones, sometimes it feels as though poetry can be only for the Ph.D. crowd. But Hillsborough poet Martha Carlson-Bradley, who also happens to have a Ph.D., believes it doesn’t have to be that way.

“Not everything in a poem is a symbol,” she said. “I think that people are too concerned about ‘analyzing’ or ‘getting’ every little detail of a poem and making it mean something. Many times the poet wants to give you an experience, a journey through the poem that includes your senses and spirit and imagination; the poet doesn’t intend for every little detail to be nailed down and forced to scream out a specific meaning.”

The same can be said of the archetypes and metaphors of fairy tales, and Carlson-Bradley has a way of bringing the broad strokes of each into precise focus with her passionate, yet restrained, poetry. Her new chapbook from Adastra Press, “Beast at the Hearth,” revisits and explores the landscape of several coming-of-age fairy tales in a beautifully hand-set and stitched edition.

Bradley is certainly no stranger to this medium; Adastra published “Nest Full of Cries,” her chapbook based on Hansel and Gretel, in 2000, and she was included in the 2003 anthology, “The Poets Grimm” (Story Line Press). Carlson Bradley is also a recipient of the N.H. State Council on the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship for 2005, and has published in journals such as New England Review, Carolina Quarterly and Marlboro Review. The turn to fairy tales, she said, came as a happy coincidence.

“I wanted to experiment writing short, intense ‘lyric moment’ poems (rather than full-fledged narratives), and a friend lent me her new copy of the collected, original tales. And I just got sucked into that world. I spent about two years totally immersed in fairy tales.”

What makes Carlson-Bradley’s work so intriguing is the details she offers, how she places the reader into the life of the character so effectively with just a few spare words. A wonderful example comes from the third poem in the collection, “The Winter Rose.”

The Beast, attentive,
meets her eye when she speaks.

And his fingers turn the apple
as he peels it:

small dark hairs
grow sparse between the knuckles,

intelligent tendons
at work in his wrist.

“I honestly don’t know where the details come from,” she said, “except imagination. For me, with the tales, it was always a question of ‘what would this be like?’ If you really were in the tale, if it were real, what would things look like and sound like and smell like? And what would you really feel about your sister or father or the beast in your life?” And therein lies the complexity.

Most fairy tales come from a distant past when oral traditions were the norm. As the stories passed from generation to generation and one region to another, they changed, grew and splintered. Only after going through the skewed lens of the Victorian age, when much of the violence and sex was expurgated from the original tales, do we find the children’s stories of today. Real life is never as easy as living happily ever after, and as Carlson-Bradley weaves her way through these tales, she exposes people with conflicted emotions and doubt, even if she has to tweak the original tale a little to get there. “I couldn’t imagine that young woman, (from “Snow White, Rose Red”) who loved the forest and nature, being happy with a prince. So I departed from the original tale if it just didn’t feel right to me, if I couldn’t imagine the characters behaving in a certain way.”

So will she go to see “The Brother’s Grimm”?

“I probably won’t see ‘The Brothers Grimm,’” she said. “But I shook my head when I saw the trailer for the movie. The Grimm Brothers were scholars, trying to find essentially German tales. The brothers lost their father at an early age and worked their way through school; they faced some class discrimination, worked at universities and even led a student protest. So they’re very interesting historical characters without having to be swashbucklers. It’s as if, for the movie world, your life doesn’t ‘count’ if you’re not young and beautiful and willing to risk your life in extreme ways.”

While there are no swashbucklers or walking trees in “Beast at the Hearth,” it is full of passion and emotion boiling just under the surface. “One dreams of his return/a paw at the door/like a gentleman’s fist—” writes Carlson-Bradley, and one can’t help but to see the beast that waits on the other side.

The Portsmouth Poetry Hoot
featuring Martha Carlson-Bradley and Jeff Friedman, followed by an open mike
Wednesday, Sept. 7 at 7 p.m.
Café Espresso, 738 Islington St., Portsmouth
www.pplp.org