Folk Behind Bars
The Privilege of Rain, David Swann, Waterloo Press 2010, £10
David Swann’s first collection springs directly from his time as Writer in Residence at HMP Nottingham Prison. It poses a number of questions: how much humanity should we grant prisoners? Is this humanity enhanced or diminished by the system?
The social aspect of his project lends it a weight of interest which is matched by a weight of responsibility: it might be voyeuristic, a poet’s vanity project. It could romanticize or glorify the lives of prisoners, trivializing their crimes and patronizing victims. If the place, subtitle (Time Among the Sherwood Outlaws), section headings, and certain poems overcook the Robin Hood angle, the work risks being stripped of any social necessity. Do we need yet another prison legend?
The poems are sorted into three sections – Seed, Sap and Stump – suggesting roots, growth; strength, weakness; softness, hardness. The first, ‘The Prison has One Beautiful Tree’ recalls the Bible’s use of tree images, as well as all the poems which have used it since, which Don Paterson satirizes in ‘Two Trees’, from Rain. Thankfully, ‘trees’ is not all this poem is about; its transformation into an isolated robbery victim makes sure of that: ‘Then the wind comes in like a robber, / stuffs its pockets with colour, / and goes where three hundred men / yearn to follow.’
‘The Roar’ puts a name to the anger felt by caged men: ‘This thing inside the scream / and all around it’. As a keyhole shot of a feeling (‘which can’t be named or touched’) it feels hampered by abstractions. The question of whether language can faithfully represent anything at all has been a favourite of modern poetry, and poets’ have had varying levels of trust in it (‘even broken speech presumes’, wrote Geoffrey Hill). Here, I’m reminded of Edward Munch’s painting ‘The Scream’, in which violent rage is given a striking face. I have to wonder whether some things are best portrayed visually.
I love books that use disparate forms, genres, patterns, visual art. Many of the poems are accompanied by Clare Dunne’s evocative wood cuttings. The poems themselves are variations on story and lyric, drawing from history as much as the present. The satirical ‘Prison Ballad of the Prison Ballad’, in classic ballad stanzas, pays fine attention to sound (‘walled-in’ / ‘where men’):
X came to a walled-in place
Where men craved earth and sky.
He saw the wire, he saw the bars,
And he began to cry…
Several poems speak effectively of the purgatory between past and future freedom. ‘Ancient Welsh Poetry’ is a folksong, incantation and statement:
I have been a football searching for a boot
I have been a sheep parted from its flock
I have been a key that won’t fit its lock
I have been the seed that never took root
‘Mike’s Girl’ tells the story of her violent partner: ‘I told him straight, / it’s either me or the weapons. / You get them weapons / out this house / or I walk’. A girl ‘On the Far Side of The Wall’ introduces herself in a voice which is matter-of-fact, with an ironic, ballad-esque music: ‘My name is Margaret Tracey / And the fella I married’s in jail.’ ‘Prison Visit’, a haiku, is an emotive snapshot of institutionalization: ‘A long afternoon, / watching wind in the trees. / Maybe she won’t come.’
The poems are interspersed with prose pieces (including ‘The Privilege of Rain I’ and ‘II’). They feel fairly lengthy and dense in comparison, and might have deserved a set of their own, being more short story than prose poem. They seem to want to occupy a different headspace. However, their more conventional narration does provide a counterpoint to the mythology and lyricism elsewhere. The clash of genres could be said to reflect the system – which collects together strangers, like poems. And many pieces feel essential, like ‘First Day’ (even if ‘The Route of the Arrow’ could be Robin Hood overkill).
Despite some misgivings, The Privilege of Rain is often richly imaginative, and explores a worthy subject. I applaud its variety of form, as well as the aims of its project: to break down the walls between institution and reader. As for the ethical questions, they’re left for us to answer individually. The hero of ‘Said in an Evening Class’, a slant-rhymed heroic couplet, says it best:
He says he’s worked it out, this writing game:
‘The reader’s free; don’t shut the door on him.’