• Carol Rumens was born in South London and grew up there. In addition to her own verse, she has published a number of translations of Russian poems and has, according to the critic Ben Wilkinson, a ‘fascination with elsewhere’. This fascination is clear in The Émigrée, which deals with a land and a city which for the speaker is permanently ‘elsewhere’.

• This poem ties in heavily to ideas of asylum and refugees. It is never clear why the speaker has left their home or when and where this was, however it is focused on the conflict of emotions from child and adulthood.

There once was a country... I left it as a child

but my memory of it is sunlight-clear

for it seems I never saw it in that November

which, I am told, comes to the mildest city.

The worst news I receive of it cannot break

my original view, the bright, filled paperweight.

It may be at war, it may be sick with tyrants,

but I am branded by an impression of sunlight.

The white streets of that city, the graceful slopes

glow even clearer as time rolls its tanks

and the frontiers rise between us, close like waves.

That child’s vocabulary I carried here

like a hollow doll, opens and spills a grammar.

Soon I shall have every coloured molecule of it.

It may by now be a lie, banned by the state

but I can’t get it off my tongue. It tastes of sunlight.

I have no passport, there’s no way back at all

but my city comes to me in its own white plane.

It lies down in front of me, docile as paper;

I comb its hair and love its shining eyes.

My city takes me dancing through the city

of walls. They accuse me of absence, they circle me.

They accuse me of being dark in their free city.

My city hides behind me. They mutter death,

and my shadow falls as evidence of sunlight.