HABEAS CORPUS by JILL MCDONOUGH
reviewed by HEATHER GREEN
Salt Publishing, 2008
Wave Books’ State of the Union anthology, with its minimal editorial content, let the diverse selections speak to what a political poem can be. Another book of 50 political poems released in 2008, Jill McDonough’s Habeas Corpus (Salt Publishing) contributes, in a unique way, to the larger conversation on this topic and adds to the growing body of political poetry written in the 21st Century. A collection of fifty Shakespearean sonnets, each about a different execution in American history, Habeas Corpus is political first in the sense that it turns its attention on people who have largely been disregarded in our history, people who have lost their lives to a legal practice that is essentially inhumane.
Though the title contextualizes the book within today’s political climate, calling to mind the current suspension of habeas corpus, the book is ultimately concerned with producing, within the poems, the bodies of fifty particular people who have been legally executed in America, and bearing witness to how, and often to why, those bodies’ lives were extinguished. Each poem is titled with a date and a name, starting with “Early 1608: George Kendall” of the Jamestown colony, “the first man executed by the state.” As the book moves from 1608 to 2005, people are executed for small crimes like theft, for ideological crimes like “spreading Quakerism,” or for practicing witchcraft, to cite a few examples. Native Americans who fought in the “Indian War” appear here alongside Civil War deserters. The more publicized cases of Sacco & Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs, and Timothy McVeigh are also included.
The book might alternately have been titled A History of American Fear, because each sonnet’s micro-narrative seems to reflect the greatest fears and paranoias of its era: religious difference, loss of property, Communism, and, pervading every time period, we find the fear of anyone who is not white. Because of the simple choice of chronology, the collection does read like a history, and not, as might have been the danger, like a collection of morbid curiosities. In fact, the impact of the reality of the particulars builds as, page by page, these details become more familiar to the contemporary reader.
In an early account of a “boatswain” convicted of mutiny, William Fly “awed / the crowd with advice to the hangman on his trade: / he tied the knot himself. They let him sway, / then tarred his body, and gibbeted him in the bay.” There is one kind of grim reality depicted in those lines, but it is a different, more chilling thing to read, of Oliver Cruz’ lethal injection, the second in Huntsville, Texas on the night of August 9, 2000, that it took place in “The same chamber, same gurney, but they used / new sheets, needles, and tubing for each one. / Five minutes after strapping in Cruz they were done.”
McDonough researched this material between 2000 and 2005, during which time she also taught creative writing to college students in Massachusetts prisons. The poems are so meticulously researched that the word count in the notes section of the book probably exceeds that of the poems themselves. Because the two parts of the book are bound together so closely by McDonough’s collage method – integrating (italicized) quotations from eyewitness accounts, court records, and news reports of the events themselves into the compact poems -- this format serves her project well. The author’s voice rarely enters in overtly, and she avoids didacticism effectively this way, but she is present everywhere in the volume as curator, documentarian, citizen, and, of course, poet.
McDonough’s selection of poetic form is a defining choice in Habeas Corpus. Though the stanza breaks and line spacing vary to good effect between the poems, she holds closely to the Shakespearean sonnet form, sometimes utilizing and other times resisting the sonnet’s native rhetorical structure. Though some poems employ full end rhymes, often the rhymes are subtle, and the meter varies enough that some sections read like the horrified conversational speech that might surround the subject matter. For example, in the poem in which McDonough’s own experience is the most present, “November 11, 1831: Nat Turner,” the speaker states:
My class
in the prison disagrees, has trouble with
Nat Turner, with the visions, violent acts
against children who “never hurt him.” Upset,
one blurts out, “I was tortured and abused
by my boyfriend, then killed some other guy, and that
ain’t right. . .
In other poems, perfectly or near perfectly iambic lines come in surprising places, often in quotations like this one from Aileen Wournos, commenting on the media’s overexposure of her death penalty case, which included the making of the movie Monster, “You sabotaged my ass society! / inhumane fucking living bastards.”
Because the poems contain so many fragments from records of events that took place in five different centuries, the sonnet form creates a continuity that allows multiple voices to speak using various registers, which vary from the religious to the legal to the scientific to the expletive. The form also helps the reader consider the poems, and thus their subjects, side by side, and to consider each as part of a chain of events that does, indeed, connect to the present day. The poems function alternately as elegies, historical records, and disjointed meditations on the nature of culpability. In another light, each sonnet is a cell in which each prisoner can be seen for a moment.
McDonough uses her considerable skill not only to describe, but to truly bear witness to the executions, the executed, and the executioners, in their human detail, compressing multiple dimensions of “the facts” into her surprising sonnets. In one of the last poems in the volume, “September 3, 2003: Paul Hill,” a religious man who shot two people outside an abortion clinic is executed. A biblical quotation from the final couplet gives, in an example of McDonough’s eloquent technique, a passage that could be used by some as a justification for and, by others, as an argument against capital punishment, “Whosoever sheds / the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed.”