Review:
The Immigration Handbook
by Caroline Smith and
Land-Music & Black Mountainss
By Ruth Bidgood and
Animal People
By Carol Rumens From Planet 227
Chris Kinsey reviews
The Immigration Handbook
by Caroline Smith and
Land-Music & Black Mountains
by Ruth Bidgood and
Animal People By Carol Rumens
Seren, £9.99
Caroline Smith’s poems about people seeking asylum are astonishing. They’re as clear and precise as surgical scalpels. These poems, sterilised from despair and anger, do not seek to accuse or wound. They make incisions to implant empathy and compassion for refugees’ enduring loss, uncertainty and trauma and for some of the people ‘under siege from the urgency’ of administering their fate amidst a terrible backlog of applications. Smith has a remarkable talent for distilling physical experiences into imagery which resolve into unforced epiphanies about the way things are:
just as an early morning frost brings outSign in to read more
a previously invisible conspiracy of
white cobwebs connecting the grasses.
