Bearing witness: Violent tragedies infect Sudbury poet's new works

SUDBURY - How can poets respond to the constant news of school shootings, terrorist attacks and atrocities against women around the world?

Rather than turn away, Helen Marie Casey wrote “Zero Degrees,” a chapbook that seeks to understand the origins of pervasive violence through 20 poems of startling power and empathy.

“I couldn’t comprehend the violence we’ve all been seeing,” she said recently. “I saw the need to bear witness through poetry.”

In spare verse infused with graphic imagery, the Sudbury poet carries readers to an ISIS execution by fire, the Boston Marathon and MetroWest schools and homes where children killed their classmates and asks them to look without flinching.

“Bullets and knives search out targets, terror everywhere. Hate masked,” Casey wrote in “Zero Degrees,” the collection’s tone-setting opening poem. “Extermination is missionary, is the purpose of war, precisely down to zero, not even one left to keen or pray or return fire. / Evil metastasizes…”

Describing the collection, poet and editor Jack Bedell wrote Casey’s poems “offer such resistance to the violent tragedies infecting our world.”

“Casey’s lines give necessary voice to victims of terror … (and) her poems pay tribute and empower through memory those whose lives are often avalanched under the news cycle as it rolls on,” he wrote.

While John Keats discovered beauty – and ultimately truth – in a Grecian urn, Casey turns yesterday’s headlines into haunting poems.

In “Rukhshana,” she asks “Who will remember” the beautiful, young woman stoned to death in Afghanistan in 2015 for refusing an arranged marriage to elope with her lover.”

“A target for men who hated her defiance,” Casey wrote. “She prayed aloud to Allah as the men lusted after what? Her body? Her blood”? Her death? Her annihilation?”

She then asks, “What is there to say when killers do not pay, mothers mourn, fathers curse and nothing changes Allah is nowhere near.”

Casey said she kept her language spare by employing a “staccato effect of fact after fact, without commentary, to create for readers the sensory perception” of brutality against a 19-year-old woman.

Explaining how poetry can effect change, she said, “We can’t say, ‘Let’s close out the darkness because it makes us uncomfortable. It doesn’t happen offshore. It happens in our community. There is something in the hearts of men and women and it seems to me we have to have open eyes about it.”

Casey said her newest chapbook focuses on “horrific incidents of violence” so the victims at home and abroad “will not be forgotten.”

Along with several women killed by mobs of Taliban supporters, victims of a terrorist attack in Paris, she includes a terse poem, “About the Murdered Boy,” referencing the fatal stabbing of 15-year-old James Alenson at Lincoln-Sudbury High School in 2007 by a deeply troubled older student.

Casey concludes the poem with a startling image that seems to suggest how the public becomes inured to violence.

“One boy stabs another./ I’d prefer to say the earth groans./ It doesn’t./ Winter earth grows a hard shell./ No sound penetrates.’”

Asked if writing about such grim subject had been difficult, Casey replied, “They were not painful to write. It would have been painful not to write them.”

Casey transforms acts of violence in Yemen, Nigeria and Paris, as well as Sudbury and Boston, into probing meditations that challenge readers to search for the roots of barbarity in religion, misogyny, alienation and mental illness.

While all are based on actual events, she generally uses the victim’s first names, such as Zareena, Rukshana or Saba, to remind readers they are real people. Yet she makes their suffering emblematic of cultural and gender conflicts that erupt into hatred and violence.

Lee Mendenhall, a longtime member of a Wayland poetry workshop with Casey, praised her for writing “compelling poems on a really tough subject.”

He was impressed by her success “concentrating” often horrific events into a stark poetic verse that lets readers experience them in profound ways.

“Helen’s poems are very unusual and must have been difficult to write. She’s very concerned about cultures that seem to approve of violence and the perpetrators have a sense of entitlement,” said the Framingham business owner.

An award-winning author, Casey has previously published three chapbooks, often about iconoclastic women who over overcome great odds to triumph in social justice or the arts. They are “Fragrance Upon Her Lips,” poems about Joan of Arc, “Inconsiderate Madness,” about martyred Quaker Mary Dyer, and “a biography, My Dear Girl: The Art of Florence Hosmer.”

Casey’s singular strength in “Zero Degrees” is her refusal to sentimentalize murdered women by transforming them into “angels” who float above a violent world, providing happy endings where none exists.

In the collection’s concluding poem, “The Murdered Women,” she writes, “Their every thought is of return, sweet return, the memory of the final moments engulfed not in forgiveness, but in amber a knowledge that can never be erased.”

Asked if she thought her poems would help reduce the violence afflicting innocent victims around the world, Casey paused before answering.

”I hope so,” she said, “but I don’t know.”

Helen Marie Casey’s “Zero Degrees” can be purchased through Amazon or for $14.99 through her publisher online at www.finishinglinepress.com.