An intriguing review of my chapbook, 'Letters to a Dead Man'

By Beatriz Copello, published in Compulsive Reader

This reviewer chose to read and review my chapbook before looking at Breaking into Pentridge Prison, the memoir which it accompanies. She felt she was best qualified to deal specifically with the poetry – which is fine, as I had wanted the chapbook to be able to stand alone.

In fact the two people I approached for the back cover blurb also experienced it without seeing the memoir until later – though each had known me a long time, and I think had some awareness of my work in Pentridge.  Beatriz, however, was a stranger to me.

How fascinating to me, to see what a complete stranger with no knowledge of the back story would make of the chapbook! She found it, initially, somewhat more mysterious than I had expected or intended – but then, it does, as Tony Page says on the back cover, have 'a deliberate lack of specifics.'

Some of her comments startled me (not necessarily a bad thing); others gratified me. It's always good to be told that one's writing has moved and engaged a reader! 

Click on the link above if you too would like to check out her assessment.

Review of 'Blood from Stone' in Compulsive Reader

I'm thrilled about this wonderful review. I think this book deserves to be considered for its own sake, not only in conjunction with my two books about Pentridge.

Read the review here.

A new review of 'The Pentridge Trilogy'

 

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  https://pentridge-prison-inside-out.square.site/ 

(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.

A Review of SECRET LEOPARD

From The Smoking Poet 
Book Review by Zinta Aistars

Secret Leopard: New & Selected Poems 1974-2005 by Rosemary Nissen-Wade


Softcover
124 pages
Publisher: Alyscamps Press, 2005
ISBN: 0-9764509-1-7


The Australian poet Rosemary Nissen-Wade writes in her poem titled, “Crossing the Great Water:”
Words are such useless things
compared with the touch of a hand,
a smiling mouth, a soft eye…
Useless things, words. But all we have
when we live so distant.
All that we have to cross
the great spaces of air and ocean
lengthening between us.
But Nissen-Wade has taken those “useless words” and given them wings to cross the space between the poet and the reader. In an extensive collection of poetry written over a span of more than 30 years, we are witness to the poet’s literary growth. Her topics are large and timeless, yet Nissen-Wade brings them home to the individual reader in the everyday, unadorned words we all know, and with words that reach to the hidden heart, where large things live: love, death, faith, hope — and just in time, without waste, aimed true. In “Supreme Compliment,” she writes:
I miss one lover.
Easy man, unfurling
as a fronded fern to sip the sun
leisurely
uncontrived.
Revealed:
The fragile core firming,
stretching alive. Sensitive
in touch and movement,
playfully intent.
He made love like a woman.
The whole person.
In admirable economy of words, Nissen-Wade sums up the wish of women everywhere, the struggle for what satisfies and lasts, the largesse of love for person from person, without a hint of unnecessary drama, no soapbox in sight, no garish decoration, because none is needed. This is the lover she misses, this one, and none of the others. In that, saying it all.
Other near perfect poems are “Incarnation” (“What ancient wind now sucks and cries/at our stones and walled places?”), “Autumn” (“lost faces/drifting on memory”), and again the stunning economy of words expressing something nearly too big for words in “The Same Valleys” (“I’m with you and alone, it’s quiet, my outline fills”). Nissen-Wade’s talent is in using the bare bones of big ideas and letting the reader fill in their own outlines with the echo of their own experiences. She says, simply, what we suddenly recognize we have been trying and trying to say all along, now only gasp in recognition: yes! That’s it… exactly.
An occasional miss, as in “Writing the Prison” or a section called “From Small Poems of April, 1991” that could be eliminated entirely without lessening the value of the whole, doesn’t keep this collection from being an overall poetic goldmine. Even in that obligatory poem every poet seems to eventually write in some version about writing itself, Nissen-Wade’s “Always the Writing” is fresh and personal. The collection concludes with a fitting series of goodbye poems, written about the poet’s mother and a friend named Karen, observing and capturing the process of human disintegration without melodrama or pity.
“…Each word brings me/closer to the edge of being singular,/discovering my own pains and rewards…”
It takes courage to take on the turning points of life, the rites of passage, but what else truly matters? Nissen-Wade has not only the courage, but the skill and talent to do so successfully.

A Review of Andrew E Wade's JORELL

From  The Smoking Poet

Book Review by Zinta Aistars


Jorell


* Softcover, 112 pages
* Publisher: 1st ed. Aust. Booksellers Assoc.,
2nd ed. Life Magic

* ISBN: 978-0-9752485-1-5



“For those who believe in fairies .... and those who don’t.”
Fairies... do I believe in them? I had to wonder as I read this slim book by Andrew E. Wade, an Australian author. I wasn’t sure into which category I land, believer or non. Surely I believed as a child? And I remember well how my own children believed when they were small, peeking into bushes, checking behind tree leaves, listening to the rustling in the wind. Perhaps I fall into the group of those who want to believe...
Whatever your outlook on fairies, anyone can enjoy the story of Jorell. She is a tiny fairy in Australian woods who guards the forest, but also seems to keep a kind eye out for the occasional good human who wanders into her woods. Eight-year-old Tim is one of those humans. Jorell is taken by surprise when the boy can, in fact, see her, as few humans can. Certainly not as they grow older, inhibited by their own disbelief, their own “unreadiness” to open their eyes and see. But once the two have established that they can indeed interact, and they become comfortable with “mind-talking,” or telepathy, as the preferred mode of communication, it turns out they can help each other in a collaboration between species.
Little Tim’s father, as it turns out, works at the nearby sawmill, and the story of Jorell takes on an environmental message. It is not a simple problem with a simple solution. The loggers are sawing down an old-growth forest. But to save the forest would mean putting many out of work. Add to that Tim’s problem with convincing his father, a very rational and logical man who doesn’t believe in such as fairies, and the conflict of the story is set up.
It is no easier for fairies to believe in good humans. Jorell must convince her own kind to trust them to help in saving the forest:
“...why do you trust him? He has no understanding of us. He and his [human] kind are upsetting the balance of nature - cutting and burning trees, polluting the air, destroying the animals, turning the land into desert, blasting great wounds into the hills and mountains, and forcing more and more of us to withdraw to the forests. What makes this manchild different?
“All that you have said is true, Kraw. I do not excuse what has and is still being done. But humanity is not evil. Most humans are peaceful, loving and kind. They want to live in friendship. It is easy to see the bad deeds, less easy to see the good ones. If we give up, not trusting in the power of love, we are lost...”
A strong message, and true. But will it be enough? And in time? Tim must convince his cynic father of the life in the forest, but he must also come to understand that jobs without a healthy environment are meaningless. He must also convince his young classmates at school, and his teacher, to assist in this effort. Fairy and manchild are fully dependent on each other to solve a shared problem.
This is a charming tale with an important message, suitable for young children, but enjoyable for an adult who perhaps enjoys reading to children. The language is pretty bare bone, the dialogue a tad stilted and unadorned with the detail that might truly bring the scene to life, nevertheless, the merits outweigh these shortcomings.
To learn more about the author and his own experiences with a fairy named Jorell, inspiration for this tale, visit Andrew and his wife Rosemary's blog, The Truth About Fairies.