Editorial Note by Max Wallis
Across Dunne’s sequence, we move from the mother’s humiliation to the child’s car journey toward the father’s absence. By the time we reach In the Prison Gardens, love exists only within visitation hours… a ritual of limited touch, a tenderness fenced by rules.
The poem is devastating in its restraint. Dunne frames the setting with almost documentary calm: “lifers play Rummy with their families,” “offenders have picnics with their children.” The world she enters is both ordinary and impossible: a place where the worst people are allowed moments of grace, and where she must find her own.
The final image — “on a perfect lawn” — carries all the ache of what’s unsaid. Perfection here means control, containment, an unnatural order imposed upon grief. Yet within that manicured space, a daughter’s love reaches through the system, however briefly.
Dunne writes the unwriteable: how love survives its own disfigurement, how memory keeps touching what the body can’t.
Dominique Dunne is a former Barbican poet and poetry producer for the Shake the Dust Festival at Southbank Centre. She has supported Kae Tempest, performed at Ronnie Scott’s, and delivered a TEDx talk on original writing. Dominique holds a BA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and has taught poetry to both children and adults. Writing from personal experience on heartache and joy, she believes that ‘Poetry can bridge the gap between the personal and the universal.’ Currently, she works as a creative career coach, helping young people break into the arts.
