The Immigration Handbook Poems By Caroline Smith Caroline Smith by Caroline Smith 9781781723227, 9781781723210, 1781723222, 1781723214 instant download after payment.

The strikingly moving poems in Caroline Smith’s The Immigration Handbook are the fruit of the author’s career as an Immigration Caseworker for one of the most diverse inner-city areas in London. Her characters are careful composites of people she’s observed. They step vividly off the page, as if out of the headlines and we meet them: such as the battered Russian boxer in hiding; such as Dr. Khan, ‘who has been walking to Hounslow each week for seven years to sign his name’; such as the nurse who, denied citizenship for a petty crime, kills herself, as she believes this is the only way her children might be allowed to stay in the UK.

Interspersed with these sometimes harrowing stories, there are quieter poems where the contrast between first and third worlds pricks the conscience as with the Brazilian cleaner, Esta Cunha de Silva, in ‘Domestic Worker’ who picks rhubarb in an English garden while remembering the sounds of chainsaws in the Amazon, and with ‘Mr. Giang’, who speaks ‘sixty-two Vietnamese bird languages’ but ‘hasn’t yet mastered English.’ All through this book the dramatic emotions of the immigrants, veering between hope and despair, are conveyed with simple descriptions of their circumstances and of their feelings, in beautifully clear, expressive language: ‘Before poverty and disenchantment had/seared his unsuspecting heart, he had talked/ to her of the water, the longing and/waiting…’ (from ‘Nursery Tales’).

Amid these human and lyrical moments the cold language of the bureaucrats runs like an icy stream. We also hear from the judges, social workers, immigration officers and caseworkers who must enforce, often with brutal detachment, but just as often with reluctance and empathy, the laws of the state. Smith artfully lifts and reconstructs Border Agency reports of detention raids on frail, failed asylum seekers. She reveals heartless adjudications where hopeful citizens, often clearly victims of trauma, are dismissed in the third person, as…