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Sinead Morrissey
The State of the Prisons
Sinead Morrissey's Collection was Reviewed by Munayem Mayenin and was first
published in July Issue 2006
Carcanet Book
Pages: 58
Price@ £6.95
The State of the Prisons is Sinead Morrissey's third collection which is going
to be remembered as a great piece of poetic work of our time. If anyone wants to
write a phd thesis in a poetic form and style and not lose the creativity, life
and heat of it they will have to read the poems of this collection.
The title of the collection has been taken from the published findings of the
eighteenth century prison reformer John Howard, the collection takes us to
various prisons in different time zones from John Howard's Europe to modern day
China and other places where our liberty gets bondaged.
The collection is a product of a combined support of residencies, grants and
commissions and the poems are products of not only serious research but also a
lot of travelling, however, the outcomes are stunningly powerful, deeply moving,
genuinely humane and assuredly potent and poignant.
The State of the Prisons is a Poetry Society Recommendation and has recently won
an award deservingly so. With this collection Sinead established herself as
serious poet with a deep rooted faith in humanity and she enjoys not only the
skills of a great wordsmith but also has the humanity, care and compassion
coupled with the empathy that is required to visit one's mind and recreate it so
that readers are getting to know the human being behind the name.
People in the areas of law and penal administration and its reform are aware of
John Howard as a reformer, as a champion of the dispossessed and damned, namely
the prisoners, here, however, Sinead Morrissey presents a man, a human being who
presents himself with flesh and blood, with guilt ridden mind and the agonies
that he went through. Each person who has achieved greater good in this life has
had to make great personal sacrifices. But John Howard is brought to life in
this collection as someone to whom the readers could relate to and feel close in
his triumphs, fames and fears as well as guilt.
The State of the Prisons is a long six part poem where John Howard sees his
life. This is relatively a short poem but bears epic qualities while it
concentrates on unfolding the geography of John's mind it portrays a landscape
of Europe where:
"Death has no terrors for me.
I have ridden the Devil's coach road, I have discovered
It leads, in every city in Europe, to the mansions of governors."
Powders fizz in a glass. The admiral who has travelled
Thirty miles to smile encouragingly
Tries to change the subject but his voice unravels."
Describing what got him into looking into Prisons in Europe John says:
"At the first sitting of the Assizes
The prisoners entered, pulling on long chains.
A muscle jerked in my thumb. The judge was eminent,
Bored, ecclesiastical, inured to the stench of sweat and excrement
That flowered where they stood. I was reeling back to a stone hole
And darkness interminable, as the felon's crimes
Were pronounced against them in a nasaloid drone.
When it was over, I barked six questions at the Crown officials.
Why are they not clean? Why so thin?
Why ill? Why are felons and debtors, women and men,
Chained and tried together? Why, when chosen for release,
Do debtors stay listed on the turnkney's roll call?
What fees remain to pay? Justice sat asleep
In a rolled wig. I metamorphosed into an enthusiast.
And so it was my journey started to every prison in Europe?"
The greatness of this poem is in the way it unfolds the man behind the name John
Howard, with all his humanity and frailty while at the same time unfolding
Europe and the state in which prisons were killing prisoners with utter contempt
and sheer disregard to humanity yet the rich and powerful continued to consume
wealth and its dazzling razzmatazz.
The poem not only talks about prisons in literal terms but on another level it
sees it creeping into human bodies when it is frail with diseases and illnesses
and possibly when humanity is dying in us we become prisoners too living in the
prisons of inhumanity.
"Forget me. To posterity.
I leave a syphilitic son, a vision of prisons."
He talks of personal tragedy and sadness. His first wife died in 1755 and
second died in 1765 giving brith to their son.
"I was not designed for intimacy. The boy bothered me,
Mooning in my shadow like a criminal,
And sickly. I tried Lockean discipline: cold baths, daily:
Wet socks; no sweetmeats. He promised to obey me,
Even irrationally. I sat him in the root house once in February
And did not lock the door, to see if he would stay
Despite cold. (He stayed.)
With manifest success with his report and work John Howard ended up weeping
inconsolably. He lost two wives and thought himself not designed for intimacy,
even though sickly and following him like a shadow he had a son and he had come
home to find him dying:
"By the time I finally encountered him, flailing and spitting in my hallway.
Demented with hatred. Pretence was useless, sophistry over,
As he raved he had known neither father nor mother,
That I had twisted him with neglect. I wept. He was destined for an asylum.
Must reform const exponentially? My conscience sears me, as with David I say:
O my son Absalom, my son my son."
The State of the Prisons is undoubtedly going to be treated as one of the finest
English poem of contemporary poetry for its powerful portrayal of a human being
who had endured costly tragedies and even though he earned better days for
prisons and prisoners he had to endure his own son becoming a prisoner before
his eyes.
China is a 9 part poem where readers invent a country on the go and they relive
the intense, inquisitive and intelligent look and experience that the poet has
undergone on a transitional window of a foreign landscape where life and
memories of the poets are at times float like reflected leaves on a calm lake
only to be wiped away by sudden wind's arrival.
"Conjure the Yangtze and the Yellow River
And bring them a matter of hours together
On the same train line and both of them seen
Through semi-darkness on a flickering screen
Which is and is not a window. Blow
Over the waters to buckle them. Add snow."
And presumably the readers would find the China the poet has experienced and
provided a window for us to experience.
There are short poems too that are equally powerful and self assured like their
poets full of character and refreshing outlook and language.
"My fathers in my fingers, my mother's in my palms.
I lift them up and look at them with pleasure-
I know my parents made me by my hands."
(Genetics)
In The State of the Prisons Sinead is at her most shining brilliance, confident
in her craft and craftsmanship (or should it be craftswomanship?) as well
as her viewpoint and experience and self assured in the achievements and their
reception. This collection is a mature end product of a self assured poet that
nurtures readers both with the joy and thrill of language and imagination and
the poignancy of the poet's experience and recreation of what is life
transformed into art of words.
The State of the Prisons is such a collection that must get a place in every
poetry reader's personal collection in the country and the world.
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