An elaborate persona collection for American feminism, What Woman That Was: Poems for Mary Dyer (Final Thursday Press) by Anne Myles explores the foundations of a culture that would both vilify and glamorize actions of rebellion.
This poetry collection is an incredible homage to “the courageous and troublesome women throughout history whose stories have been lost.”
Myles, an associate professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa who retired in 2019, blends her discovery of one Mary Dyer — a follower of religious dissenter Anne Hutchinson in the early American colonies — with a personal perspective. In doing so, she weaves realities through the poems in this collection, building a world around both her contemporary readers and her 17th century subject.
Using found elements and a keen understanding of poetic form, the book follows Dyer, a woman all but lost to history save for her letters urging for gender equality and emphasizing her understanding of a just god who cares for all of humanity.
The collection takes its title from John Winthrop’s A Short Story of the Rise, reign, and ruin of the Antinomians, Familists, & Libertines written in 1644. There, Winthrop documents Hutchinson being “cast out of the Church.” “[A] stranger observing, asked another what woman that was, the other answered, it was the woman who had the Monster…”
A curious reader could surely research Dyer on their own. However, I suggest those interested in the stories of “monstrous women” first explore these poems. With empathy and deep investment in her subject, Myles puts herself and her readers in the position of both witnessing Dyer’s trials and experiencing them in Dyer’s shoes.
Early in the collection we learn that Dyer, before coming to the Americas, spent a year in isolation as a plague overtook London. She studied the Bible and grew passionate about the text, as it gave her some peace during an epidemic.
While the poem “Plague Year” discusses London in 1625, it is clear that we are experiencing a mirror to many of our own societal realizations from 2020. The poem ends with Dyer awakening to an unexpected compassion for her community: “Dead, they’re not lost — not rot / but glory. Inside the white cage of her ribs / something nameless beats its wings.”
Later, we see Myles speak as herself as she notices Dyer in her own life. When Myles visits Dyer’s grave in the poem “Bones” we hear pain. “The past is a locked gate,” Myles thinks, “time itself is a violence,” and then, “a grave-spot locals once showed travelers / is gone now …This sound / of small waves shushing on the beach: / how many billion, uninterrupted, each / break like a rung on a ladder I could climb / back to a day she stood here living?”
There is pain in what is lost in Dyer’s story, and that is where the power of this collection lies. We know that stories are lost, that rebellions for which people given their lives are forgotten, but in What Woman That Was we experience both the story and heartbreak of losing it.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s July 2023 issue.
