Editorial Note by Max Wallis
What a poem this is, dear readers. Dunne’s Mother revisits a family story with unflinching clarity — a father imprisoned after a string of bank robberies, a mother wrongfully suspected and humiliated. The poem begins in rumour, with police dubbing the couple “Bonnie and Clyde”, and moves inward, to the mother’s body: a site of both evidence and accusation.
What’s striking is the precision of its gaze. Dunne writes not from melodrama but from memory’s still room: each detail exact, each image carrying the weight of what can’t be said aloud. The strip-search becomes emblematic of how women - and indeed mothers - are criminalised for surviving. The Caesarean scar, the breast milk, the cold cell: they form a counter-narrative to the state’s gaze: a language of endurance.
Mother is not a plea or protest, but a document of love under siege. It exposes cruelty without spectacle, finding poetry in the quiet act of holding a child amid harm. Dunne’s restraint is its own defiance — a refusal to let shame speak last.
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.
