Polly Clark reviews The State of the Prisons by Sinead Morrissey

Sinead Morrissey's new collection is impressive in its range of poetic styles and forms: from an epic ballad, to a travelogue, to short and sharp pieces dealing with subjects such as forgiveness and the Troubles, this book shows the skills of an ambitious, curious writer, engaged with the world and with the confidence to try new ways of showing it to us.

The title poem 'The State of the Prisons', demonstrates this ambition: she aims in six pages of verse to create nothing less than a comprehensive biography of prison reformer John Howard, complete with historical context, larger-than-life-characters and personal tragedy.

Her first good decision in taking on this task is to opt for a language and form reminiscent of the time: the poem is a narrative ballad, with a few modern touches such as a climactic, punchline ending. Her second is to include everything: court scenes, statistics, an explication of Howard's philosophical approach, which makes the poem uneven, but also gives it tremendous life. The rhyme scheme, which could be punishing, is treated with imagination as well as respect: 'attested dead' paired with 'breathless but decided' is a clever liberty which keeps the story rollicking along. In this poem you learn, I suspect, everything that is of interest about Howard: his manner (brisk and self-righteous), his work, his fame, his guilt, his syphilitic son. In fact, there would seem after reading this poem very little else you would need to know, unless you were a specialist in prison reform. As a piece of poetic compression, it is little short of brilliant; the only question that hovers slightly over it is one about necessity.

This question about necessity returns elsewhere in this book, mostly in the longer poems. Morrissey is one of several writers taken by the British Council on a train ride through China, and she has written a sequence of poems about this journey. This is the only real disappointment in the book, and it is not so much with Morrissey's writing, but with the pointless constraints she has been put under. Why take writers to China and imprison them on a train, only glimpsing the country and the people from behind glass? Why not let a writer of Morrissey's obvious talents and engagement out? This is a poem full of lost opportunities, of moments only glimpsed, of experience denied. It is to her credit that her poems express an ambivalence with the enforced distance: in '5' she writes: 'We loiter like Oliver in the dining car./ Brunch comes as shimmering bowls of noodles under a film/ of oil and we sit watching the landscape unfurl like a newsreel/ into history'. It seems pretty sad that she is reduced to writing about 'brunch' whilst in the most exciting developing country in the world. Being a real writer, she makes what she can of the experience, including everything she can and trying to give meaning by linking her own remembrances of the past. To me it seems the fault of a project which clearly shut her away from experience and allowed her to bring very little of China back to us that we could not have found in a newspaper. I wonder what John Howard would make of it.

It is in the shorter poems that Morrissey has real emotional clout: there are no question marks over the necessity of writing 'Clocks' or 'Forgiveness', and a poem like 'Genetics' allows her to demonstrate formal skill and emotional power in a way that resonates and stays with the reader. There is no doubt that this book shows Morrissey staying true to her own vocation as a poet: developing in range and skill, boldly trying new things, making use of her experience no matter what that is, and above all staying curious.

The State of the Prisons, Carcanet, £6.95

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.