Inconsiderate Madness

“Helen Marie Casey’s powerful poems about a dark period of American history when people were hanged by zealots in the name of God are a necessary reminder for our contemporary world of how power combined with prejudice can persecute and ultimately silence voices. Casey chronicles the life of Mary Dyer who was hanged because of her Quaker faith, illuminating Dyer’s courage in her determination to sustain an identity in a hostile world. Without these important poems, names like the Quakers William Robinson and Marmaduke Stevenson who were hanged, then stripped and thrown naked into a hole for the wolves, might be erased like New England gravestones whose letters have been worn down by time. Casey’s poems are compelling because her characters are embedded in a matrix of location and values that create believable identities drawing power from place: a black bird against a winter sky observed by Anne Bradstreet or ‘the ember- colored cardinal’s song’ Anne Hutchinson hears on the day she is killed by Indians. Throughout, Casey’s lyrical voice resonates, her poems compassionate but never sentimental or dogmatic. Inconsiderate Madness offers us Mary’s ‘wilding voice against the dark’ to sustain us and her spirit as a ‘flag for others / who abhor such laws as these’ to teach us to persevere, to not be closed by blackness in other hearts, but to flower by staying open to love.”

-Vivian Shipley