A REVIEW OF ANNE MYLES’S WHAT WOMAN THAT WAS: Poems for Mary Dyer

What Woman That Was: Poems for Mary Dyer. Anne Myles. Final Thursday Press, 2022. 59 pages. $14.95.

by Thomas Hallock

What Woman That Was is the kind of book one can read from the front or back. Anne Myles, a longtime scholar of early American literature and more recent (if late emerging) poet, closes these twenty-eight poems with an historical note about the woman who inspired her, Mary Dyer. An emblematic Quaker martyr, Dyer had settled in Puritan New England with her family in 1638. Following her mentor, the radical preacher Anne Hutchinson, Dyer was banished from Boston, and after miscarrying a deformed child, was derided as “the woman who had the monster.” Religious persecution took Dyer to Rhode Island, then England, then back to the Bay Colony, where (no longer with husband and children), she was sentenced to death. She escaped hanging a first time, in what could have been a trick, and after further controversies was hung—this time for real—on June 1, 1660. 

Little writing survives in Dyer’s own hand, occasioning a reflection by Myles that is both moving in its longing for connection and admirable in the refusal to take easy short cuts. An “Invocation” (actually the second poem in this book) speaks to a presence that is every bit as fleeting as sincerely-felt:

You flash along the blurred edge
of my vision: a bright eye
is what I see, a raw vibrancy,

a restless hunger
I want to sit down with.
I can’t look you in the face

just as I can’t see myself,
or maybe you are my mirror
only seemingly more beautiful

and simpler, being trapped
in a past no one can recover,
and believing so much

I don’t—as if that resolved
you into some general ground,
which I know it doesn’t.

A competing longing for connection and scholarly integrity gives shape to many of these poems, which read like clearings of moving conjecture. Myles searches from the “blurred edge / of my vision,” in a line that is both restless and vibrant, rightly enjambed. “Invocation,” one of the half dozen triplets in this volume, uses the form to spill beyond the usual binary or duality; at the same time, the sentences spool down the page with a crystalline grammatical precision. Subject and predicate appear up front (“You flash …”, “I want to sit”), while clarifying or complicating clauses tumble into the following stanzas. The effect is both impassioned and measured, like the work of an author who has been at this for a while but is just now making her own voice known.

Several poems split scenes. “Metropolitan” imagines Myles (a Manhattan native) walking along the East River, while Dyer hugs the Thames. Others carry twin bylines. “First Meeting” fuses London (1656) with Haverford, Pennsylvania (1983); when the opening stanza describes “a crackling fireplace,” it is unclear whether we are in Pennsylvania, or spiritually transported back to England. Two lives intersect in silent worship:

I want this in my life, I thought.
God wants this for my life, she thought.

“Children of Light” splits the distance between Boston (1660) and Iowa (2021), where Myles taught for two decades:

I stopped believing years ago, yet always
here I am, constantly drawn back
to images of light–its pure suspension
of human wondering.

This fusion of time and space creates a “suspension” between past and present, or the scholarly and the imagined; the effect works, because the lines themselves are both syntactically clean and open ended. A direct statement (“I stopped believing …”) sets up the sentence, and qualifications follow (“yet always”), with each succeeding phrase (“drawn back” … to what?) creating mini-drama (“pure suspension” … of what??) in a precisely measured, tumbling search.

As both scholar and poet, Myles incorporates historical archaeology, mining documents and primary texts for aesthetic purposes. In this use of the archive, her work calls to mind others, such as Natasha Trethewey, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, or Susan Howe. The persona poems especially hang living responses on very old material. “Mr. Dyer Recalls a Poem” draws upon letters to Mary from her former husband William, describing his abandonment in terms that are either poignant or slightly bemused (depending upon one’s perspective). A “First Letter” and “Second Letter,” both imagined from Dyer’s Boston jail cell, draw from the few surviving pieces of her correspondence. Elsewhere, Myles peppers in language by the martyr’s seventeenth-century oppressors. The more personal imaginings, however, do not presume easy access into historical memory. “Bones,” which describes a visit to a burial ground, begins: “I think, the past is a locked gate.” The grave where Dyer lies is now lost. Yet the same poem closes on a tactile note, making physical connection: “and here we are now, licking our salty lips.”

This volume being a search, the last two of these twenty-eight poems address Dyer directly, using the second person. “Monument” finds Myles at a statue on the campus of Earlham College, a Quaker school in Indiana. The opening triplet in this chilly ekphrastic, set in a chilly midwestern exile, denies easy connection: “You lips are not about to speak.” The past is mute. Neither poet nor her subject fully belong in the Midwest; Dyer’s image was modeled after someone else; the word “Religious Freedom,” for which she supposedly stands, awkwardly “clangs”; hers is a “blind gaze.” Yet as the poem wheels closer to a revelation, the author centers herself. The martyr offers a silent lesson: “how to follow, to witness, to resist, / to walk the one road all the long way in.” The final entry, “Encounter,” ends with appropriate ambiguity. It is not entirely clear who has encountered whom—I will guess, the poet Myles has been seeking Dyer, though unless I’m reading quite poorly, it could be the other way around. There is a final disclaimer about digging back for easy connections: “You suspect you’ve been speaking only to yourself.” Then a connection. “You dig a burrow into the dark moist American earth you both have walked on,” Myles writes; “you grab her hand and pull her in after you” and the two sing as one. The mingling is visceral, abstract, unsettling, beautiful, and erotic:

You listen to her strange tones mingled with your own. She sounds like an ancient harpsichord, like a seagull screaming. She sounds like the ocean booming, like a roomful of moans.

You finish this short volume, maybe dip into the notes. You set the book down. You reflect, and at a later time, you read the book again.

Thomas Hallock (@tbhallock) received his Ph.D. from New York University. He is the author of From the Fallen Tree: Frontier Narratives, Environmental Politics and the Roots of a National Pastoral, and the co-editor of Early Modern Ecostudies: From the Florentine Codex to Shakespeare, William Bartram, the Search for Nature’s Design: Selected Art, Letters and Unpublished Manuscripts, and John and William Bartram: Travels on the St. Johns River. He recently published a series of travel and place-based essays that explain why he loves teaching the American literature survey, A Road Course in Early American Literature (www.roadcourse.us).