A REVIEW OF CINDY VEACH’S HER KIND
Her Kind, Cindy Veach. CavanKerry Press, 2021. 96 pages. $18.00.
by Anne Myles
What does it mean for a woman to be considered a witch? How does the patriarchal image of problematic women as witches endure across history, and into the present day? And how can reclaiming this image become for a contemporary woman a source of resistance and empowerment, without erasing the marks of suffering and loss? These are the concerns of Cindy Veach’s powerful new collection Her Kind. The book compellingly interweaves two dominant strands, poems about the women hanged as witches in Salem and poems about the speaker’s painful divorce, with other elements that amplify the main themes: allusions to misogyny and “witch hunts” in the age of Trump and Kavanaugh, and exploration of more mythic dimensions of the witch image.
Considering the intersection of regional and personal histories is not new to Veach; her first book, Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press, 2017), also engages with New England history—the Boott Cotton Mills of Lowell, Massachusetts where her French-Canadian great-grandmother was a mill girl. A turn to the Salem Witch Trials seems inevitable for Veach, herself a former resident of the Salem area. But it is the foregrounding of a contemporary, individual but widely-shared story that moves Her Kind far beyond a collection of historical poetry. The opening poem, “I, Witch,” announces the book’s doubling in an arresting, tightly-knit form:
So what if I woke up changed it’s not like I’m a wild hog
or some Evill thing not a Reall hog
that follows you home Jumps into the window
a Munky with Cocks feete w’th Claws don’t believe
what my Accuser says or believe it
the fact is my divorce attorney’s building
sits on the site of the prison where they kept the Accused
in Chaines in 1692 I came there with a silk scarf
worn loosely at the neck borders looped
with colored thread he came with daisies dark
chocolate and proclaimed
my wife came towards me and found fault with me
downstairs in the dungeon they chained us to the walls
to keep our spirits from escaping in the Liknes of a bird
Divorce attorney’s office and prison—what an uncanny doubling in the book’s point of initiation! The italicized phrases are drawn from the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription project, a central resource for Veach and all students of the trials. Here, loosed from particular records, they remind us of both the fantastic and groundless quality of “evidence” of witchcraft, and its slippery transferability. The speaker—“changed,” critical, wearing suspicious garments also suggestive of a noose, merges in the last lines into a shared identity with the literal Accused—Her Kind (the title of the famous Anne Sexton poem) is of course Our Kind.
Veach draws deeply on the archival records, and close to half the poems in the collection focus on individual women accused and hanged in the Witch Trials. Sometimes these are persona poems, sometimes the speaker writes about them or addresses them directly, but in each case we get at least fragments of that woman’s story or voice. Veach works to capture the elements within a drearily recurrent set of accusations that hint at each woman’s particular grounds of vulnerability, or her traces of resistance within the trap-logic of the trials. For example, in the poem about Sarah Wildes: “Of course, the crimson scarf— / worn loosely at the neck / colorful and coy. . . . Of course, too forward (wild) / in her youth.” Or the one about Wilmot Rudd: “When asked were [the accusing girls] Bewitcht? She kept her wits. / All she would say was: my opinion / is that they are in sad condition.” Veach handles this material, easy to sensationalize, with a notably plain, matter-of-fact tone. Mingled with these are other poems reflecting on contemporary Salem, its historic traces and its tourist traps.
The account of the speaker’s marriage and divorce is handled with a light touch; as with the Salem women, we don’t get a complete narrative, but enough to sense that it involved a fraught escape from a long relationship—one not without violence—and that it took place within our recent political landscape. It is not the specifics that count but the sense of crushing oppression, of how enacting a wish for freedom inevitably puts a woman in a position of wrongness: “I tell myself / My name is fault and blame and home-wrecker and bitch.” At times this makes the book suggestive of an earlier era, when divorce was more obviously transgressive; similarly, Veach’s mythifying of marital experience often calls to mind Sexton, Plath, or early Rich. I did find myself wondering to what degree any educated, white, cisgendered heterosexual woman can truly lay claim to the status of “other” in contemporary American society. Still, the poems convince me of the intensity of the speaker’s journey as she extricates herself from “decades of eggshells / and gaslighting.” And, of course, the political climate of recent years and especially the loss of Roe remind us that no woman is safe from the images and fantasies of those in power, and their life-destroying consequences. Although there are relatively few poems that foreground explicit political content, the post-2016 landscape and its misogyny is an essential context and consideration. Often we are alerted to this context through titles: for example, the poem about Martha Corey is titled in Trump’s words, “You are Witnessing the Single Greatest Witch Hunt in American Political History,” and the one about Susannah Martin, “Such a Nasty Woman.” There is also the sonnet “Poem the Day After Kavanaugh is Confirmed to the Highest Court in the Land.”
While the subject matter is gripping, one of the book’s greatest strengths is Veach’s mastery of craft and form. One aspect of this is certainly her graceful integration of seventeenth-century discourse into modern verse, allowing it to sing in its strangeness. Beyond that, the poems shift shape throughout, flexing their own verbal magic. In addition to free verse in a range of lines and stanzas, the collection includes numerous sonnets, a ghazal, a pantoum, a duplex, and others. The poems evince tremendous delight in poetry itself, its beauty and its power to contain and transform anguish. For all the darkness of recalled and ongoing injustice the book reminds us of, this makes the book a profound pleasure to read. And after all its trials, Her Kind brings us at last to a place of release. If women are victimized by being falsely accused of witchcraft, Veach looks as well to mythic images of witches to remind us that the witch is feared because she is the woman with power and the capacity to cast spells. This is the note the book ends on, with “I, Hecate”: “Between Queen, Liminal Sorceress / Crossroads Guardian— / story of my life,” it begins. “Even if it means / I am witch—”
It took a torch, a key, a dagger
To cut away the past.
It took thirty years.
It took
All three of me.
Ultimately, Her Kind summons the legacy of the past to cast a spell in the present. Witnessing the speaker’s success as she at last escapes the noose of a bad marriage, we celebrate with her in her cry of victory that feels so deeply earned.
Anne Myles is the author of What Woman That Was: Poems for Mary Dyer, recently released by Final Thursday Press. Her poems have appeared in in On the Seawall, North American Review, Whale Road Review, Lavender Review and elsewhere. She is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Northern Iowa, where she specialized in early American literature, and received her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Read more at https://www.annemyles.com/