Inside Poetry: Voices From Prison
Prison and poetry don’t seem like two words that fit together. Prison and drugs would be more obvious. Or prison and violence. Or maybe prison and cockroaches. Badly run prisons with badly behaved prisoners, like Birmingham recently or Liverpool not so long ago or Exeter, give all prisoners a bad name. But there is another side to the story. This year I’ve edited a collection of poetry written by prisoners. It’s the seventh volume published by Inside Time the national newspaper for prisoners where all the poems have already appeared. This volume covers four years. With Victoria Grey, of the charity Give a Book, I’ve chosen the best. It also has the first Pinter prize in honour of playwright, Harold Pinter and given by his widow Antonia Fraser. It’s good to look behind the obvious, and these 200 pages show men and women who feel love, shame, joy, terrible sadness and hope for a better future. There is anger too, but often against themselves. How could they have got to where they are? These poems tell more about life behind bars than a hundred television reports or newspaper articles. A free copy of the book is in every prison library and it can also be ordered from Inside Time (£9.99).
Other Writing
- How Emma persuaded me to write ‘Perfect Happiness’
- Impossible to believe that Miss Emma Woodhouse could change anyone’s mood for the better. Conceited, narrow-minded, snobbish, insensitive are just... Read more
- Covid 19 – Buster’s Story
- It all started well. Jim was suddenly at home more. Actually, all day. The morning walk was a little longer... Read more
- Politics
- ‘Oh politics!’ exclaimed Dan as if that was the end of the matter. ‘But I was stopped in the street.... Read more
- The Wild Cherry Tree (Prunus avium)
- The Wild Cherry Tree is a hermaphrodite, both male and female, and more than a little poisonous. But this didn’t... Read more
Thoughts
-
My Stories
Writing a memoir goes against the grain of a novelist. The thrill of putting pen to paper (metaphorically speaking) is the creating of something entirely new, introducing into the world people who didn’t exist until you gave them life. By comparison, rehashing old memories is a dull activity – except perhaps for the very self-centred. The only way to make it bearable, I decided, was to turn the memories into stories, if possible catching hold of enough facts to haul them back before they float off into fiction. But even then, I became bored. In the middle of describing my time in 1970s’ Hollywood, I find a character emerging from the palm trees who is not Kevin (my husband / director), nor Stirling Silliphant (producer), nor Anthony Quinn (potential actor), but an unknown male, thrusting his way onto the stage, commanded there by my unruly imagination. London and New York a few years earlier, are also peopled by interlopers, drunk associates, small millionaires who drive Rolls Royce and invite me to their water-beds. Seeing the way things are going, I have evolved a coping strategy: I am putting down the true facts of my life (more or less) interspersed with true fiction from my imagination. At the moment it seems to sort the problem. We will see.
The serious little girl (pictured), is me in 1958, drawn by Bloomsbury artist Henry Lamb. He married my aunt Pansy, and drew all eight of us children when we were five or six years old. I can remember feeling personally responsible for the outcome, and annoyed he had made my plait so skimpy.