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Waterloo Press, based in Hove, have been around for a few
years now, and are acquiring a reputation for publishing a range of poetry
books which include the local and the international. Although not everything
they put out hits my pleasure spot the quality of the material is usually
high and these are beautifully produced paperback editions with dust-jackets
and well-designed covers, incorporating vibrant artwork with well laid-out,
easy-to-read pages.
You wouldn't want to call it a genre exactly, but since the publication of
Ken Smith's Inside Time in 1989 there
has been a lot of literature - poetry and prose - dealing with the subject of
prisons and life inside these institutions. David Swann's brilliant debut
collection, The Privilege of Rain
- Times Among the Sherwood Outlaws
- deals impressively with the issues based on his experience at HMP
Nottingham Prison, where he worked for a year as a Writer in Residence.
Swann's life experiences prior to this position seem to have been varied - he
appears to have worked as a teacher, also as a reporter in the last days of
hot metal, and as a toilet cleaner at a 'legendary' nightclub in Amsterdam -
and probably proved extremely useful in this new role where he was neither
guardian nor inmate. What's so impressive about this collection,
apart from the quality of the writing, which is both easy to read and
sophisticated, is the way that Swann questions his own motives while also
giving the reader insight into the experience of life on the inside. There
are no easy conclusions to be drawn from this book, no answers, either of the
'bleeding heart' variety or the 'lock 'em up and throw away the key'
solution, yet there is hard compassion in evidence here as well as an
investigation into the dark recesses of the self. This is a book which is
often painfully honest when dealing with issues which may be insoluble yet
it's also a very human book which has the advantage of having been written by
a very talented writer.
The book is split into three sections - Seed, Sap and Stump. The latter seems
to incorporate a lot of material which is to do with recollection and of
events which happen after the residency has finished but which are in some
way related to Swann's experiences during his period of employment in the
prison. Poems are interspersed with prose pieces and this format works very
successfully throughout the collection. 'The Unsaid' is one such prose piece
and relates the story of Swann's unexpected meeting with an ex-prisoner - a
lifer - while on his way to work in a town in another part of the country
some unspecified time later. As Swann has just been writing about a recurring
nightmare he'd been having, relating to his prison residency, you're never
entirely sure whether this meeting was real or imagined but I like to think
that it actually happened. I'm working here on the basis that there is a
strong element of autobiography in the details of this writing, a tricky area
but I'm taking this risk because the whole project otherwise seems flawed.
The ex-prisoner, after an awkward introduction, offers him his mobile phone
number which 'triggers off' a flood of thought which includes the author's
having recently experienced the death of a young girl by a hit and run
driver. The piece finishes as Swann /the protagonist takes the man's number
but refuses to give his number in return then questions whether he has done
the right thing on his train journey to work where:
ÉÉÉa young lad talked excitedly about knives through
all the
stations between East Worthing and Barnham.
(from 'The Unsaid')
The self-questioning involved in this sequence is intense and introspective
yet it also asks big questions and this collection is filled with such
moments. This is brilliant writing but its aim, if there is one, is hardly to
do with aesthetics, or if it is we are left with the uncomfortable feeling
that perhaps the power of this work includes an element of 'thrill', which
may just be a tad voyeuristic. Despite having suggested this I think there is
a humane sense of the need to understand at the heart of this book, even
where understanding involves dealing with paradox and confusion, which probably
makes 'the truth' in its entirety unknowable.
There's a wide range of formal devices in this collection - leaving aside the
prose, which is itself peppered with poetry and poetry's techniques -
including a couple of villanelles, ballads and the odd sonnet, mixed with a
more free-verse style which creates a degree of tension between the literary
and a more in-your-face directness which feels appropriate to the subject
matter. 'Prison ballad of the prison ballad', for example, has echoes of
Oscar Wilde:
The night,
and shame, fell slow and vast
And pinned
him to his bunk
Till he was
alone in that dark place
Where the
desperate scream for junk
(from 'Prison ballad of the prison ballad')
While this haiku shows his skill with condensed form:
A long
afternoon,
watching the
wind in the high trees.
Maybe she
won't come.
(from 'Prison visit')
There are other poems which combine a formalist approach with an ironic
appreciation of the form/content relationship but never in a manner which
entirely slips over into showmanship - these poems are well-crafted and
appropriate while being direct and often shocking, combining, at times a
degree of entertainment with a focussed intensity which disturbs:
Words have
slipped
their
moorings, gone solo.
All week, he
labours over
a story about
a killing
then reads it
to a shocked visitor,
forgetting
the facts,
thinking only
of craft.
'The way
words escape.
How proud you
get.'
How they roam
the place.
('Craft')
You could argue, I suppose, that by projecting this 'attitude' into the voice
of a persona (if, in fact, that is what he is doing!) - a prisoner in his writing class - the
writer is over-sophisticating the old argument between 'art' and 'reality',
but while he is clearly commenting on his own thoughts about these issues he
is surely also making a wider point about the relationship between what is
'real' and what is 'fiction'. You can read this short poem on different
levels but it still has something to say about the human predicament.
Which is what I'd say about this splendid collection in its entirety. I only
found it a difficult read, at times, because of the unanswerable questions it
kept asking - about the nature of criminality, of the prison system, of what
induces a person to seek a job in a prison, as a warder or a writing tutor,
for example. This writing is clear but not over-showy, effective but also
very readable and often entertaining, despite its casting a brief light on an
experience most of us will never have, fortunately so, I'd say. It also has a
lot to say, incidentally, about the state of our society but it's hardly fair
to expect answers from a book of poems. An impressive volume. Highly
recommended.
© Steve
Spence 2012
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