Swear Down

Nick Moss began writing these Koestler Award-winning poems at the beginning of a two-year prison sentence. Swear Down is a bluntly eloquent account of violent men and a violent system, the death-in-life purgatory of lifers and suicides, hauntings, jail-pale ghosts and skeleton choirs on the landings.

With a bit of help from Kafka, Sarkozy, Chris Grayling and William Burroughs, these poems explore the brutal hierarchies of life Inside and Out – Liverpool in the 1980s, London in 1990s, Hillsborough, the New Cross Fire, Grenfell. It’s a book about a moment’s regret, a lifetime of anger and the ‘rose-tinted plexiglass of the SERCO bus to Belmarsh’. Above all, Swear Down is a study of language and poetry – the words we use to describe ourselves and the words we use when we don’t want to say anything. As Moss argues: ‘if we keep shouting, eventually we’ll hear each other…’