By Rajani Radhakrishnan, reposted with permission from her Thought Purge blog
Rosemary Nissen-Wade has published a trilogy that absolutely must find a place in your reading list for 2024. Rosemary is an excellent poet as many of you on the poetry trail know, she is also a dear friend and source of inspiration. Here’s a 13-point review of two very special books from that set.
1. Breaking into Pentridge Prison tells of her experience, in the eighties, conducting workshops for prisoners in the Northern and Maximum-Security units of Melbourne’s Pentridge prison. “If you’re not mad when you get there, you will be by the time you leave” – public view on Pentridge.
2. Describing poetry discussions in that oppressive environment, monitored by armed guards, with people incarcerated for serious crimes, Rosemary reinforces our faith in art as a medium, if not of healing, of reprieve, of light, albeit a tiny, ephemeral sliver of sunshine. “Looking back, I think I was perfect for those prison workshops. Anyway, after the first, I was hooked.”
3. The text is dotted with poetry written by the prisoners and fellow-poets and her own verses, telling their own stories in words that are at once, strange and familiar. Some of those poems found their way into an anthology published from the prison, “Blood from Stone” (the third book in the trilogy, now in a new edition). “…what price a poet / in the all-seeing / in-the-round panopticon / what price the poet’s visitor / with only that way out…” (Untitled poem – Linda Stevenson). “…There is no wish for the pool of youth, immortality / rather time’s end and be / old, dead, anything! / but be free” (Nothing – Dallas Duncan)
4. Rosemary talks of her friendship with some of those who attended the workshops, highlighting the person inside the prisoner, the poet inside the inmate. From “I’ve got these poems here. They’re not very good.” to years of affection, correspondence and meetings even after release.
5. And then she talks of love. An impossible, forbidden, enduring love. The honesty is striking as she bares details of heart and crime, leaving the reader in no doubt about the complex twists of human relationships.
6. More tellingly, she talks of how the pressure of an intimidating environment and all that the world of crime and punishment contains behind its stone walls, affects the people who dare to enter it. What happens when the ‘outside’ is forced to intersect with the ‘inside’, poetry and love are forced to interact with threats and mind-games and secrets. And how does it affect families and children? “…I taste my ageing. / All my years / you’ll go on being dead.”
7. “Apprentice on the tightrope / I juggle half-a-dozen balancing acts” – Rosemary writes of the growing unease “If they distract me, I’ll trip /A fall would be real: / There is no net.”
8. Should we look at crime as a binary? How should we think of redemption? What is the axis of social acceptance? The story of John — prisoner, poet, friend, criminal, lover — is instructive in its violent sadness. Then, should we look at love as a binary? And people? “What sad contradictory world / shuts loving men in jail — / and leaves the many others / free to walk?”
9. In the end, is this an overwhelming story about life or love or poetry? The reader wonders if there is a difference. “…I stare new darkness/ down its depth / forget too slowly / other faces trapped / in blood and stone…”
10. Letters to a Dead Man is a companion book to Breaking into Pentridge Prison. As the opening note says, the poems in it can stand alone, but become more poignant when you know the back story.
11. There are poems from last year and some that go back to 1981, with haunting lines and verses like this one: “Always / is too long a word for love” or this “A poem/ on a page you’ll never see. / Flights / impossible / even for sparrows.”
12. A memoir always struggles with what not to say, how much to say and yet there are things that can and will never be shared. But these books have enough, more than enough, to do the one thing good books do, leave the reader wiser and yet with more introspective questions than before they started.
13. “As public as a headline / Private as a night in a cell” – Rosemary has put together a one-of-a-kind memoir set that simply needs to be read. Get it from http://www.nissen-wade.com
(Photo by Rajani Radhakrishnan)
Note from Rosemary:
When I first started writing my Pentridge memoir, I posted episodes to a blog as I wrote them, and shared them with members of the online community, Poets and Storytellers United. Many were very interested and left encouraging comments – no-one more so than Rajani, whose own poetry I've admired for years, and whose own books I've been delighted to acquire. She read every episode I posted, made insightful comments, and followed them up in email discussions full of both poetic and emotional wisdom, which deepened and consolidated our friendship. As I say in the Acknowledgments in the memoir, her 'unfailing interest and deeply understanding feedback on both the writing and the content were crucial to my continuing.'
And now, having received copies of the books of the trilogy, she has written this review for her blog and given me permission to quote it. Which I have gladly done in full.