Shackles and Silence: Poems from Prison

Edward L. Edmonds is a professor of English at the University of Prince
Edward Island.

William Wordsworth once wrote of poetry as “the spontaneous overflow
of powerful feelings, recollected in tranquillity.” Such a definition
applies exactly to Rives’s poems, although his tranquillity is that
induced by a prison cell. Hence the title of this book. Rives was
sentenced to life imprisonment for second-degree murder. As might be
expected, his poems are intensely autobiographical. With a frequent
pungency of phrase and staccato delivery, he transfixes his readers’
attention on the aridity, the coarseness, the frequent put-downs of
prison routine. He also glances back to his own earlier upbringing on
occasion. His own prison introduction to the poems is by way of a
manifesto on behalf of all those serving time in prison. But there is no
indulgence in self-pity. Instead, from time to time he offers glimpses
of a self-freed mind, which grows from the sustaining power of his
wide-ranging imagination.

This is Rives’s second book of poems from prison.