Editorial Note by Max Wallis
This final poem closes Dunne’s sequence with quiet devastation. Where Mother exposed injustice and Father held distance, Lessons Learned in Prison becomes an act of paternal and perhaps therapeutic exchange: a daughter and father trading art across walls, both remaking what connection remains.
Dunne writes the unbearable with calm precision. The imagery is domestic, almost gentle — drawings, masks, Morrissey tapes — yet beneath it runs the ache of role reversal. The father becomes the student; the child, the keeper of his work. Each gift between them is both tenderness and evidence, an attempt to bridge the distance that punishment insists upon.
The final lines turn the mirror: “as one by one you pinned my childhood / on your prison wall.”
It’s an ending that collapses time, in fact: love preserved as memory, art, guilt, and survival. Dunne’s restraint allows what’s unsaid to ring louder than any declaration. Across these four poems, she builds a portrait not of crime, but of care endured: the fragile un-eraseable bond between parent and child, even when the world has taken everything else.
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.
