Eugene Donnini, widely published and active in poetry as performed art, has given the reader a powerful and condensed experience of incarceration in Pentridge Prison. The poems are interleaved with stark black-and-white photographic images of close-fitting Pentridge bluestones. These images intensify the sense of confinement and lack of freedoms that might be found elsewhere, whether remembered as lost, or hoped for. A tough monk might contemplate these stones as revelatory cosmic patterns, but inmates are more likely broken on them. The poems gravitate towards the inner form which is the soul of the incarcerated person, the eternal verities of the…