Caroline Smith's The Immigration Handbook is different. It's single theme. It's based on her work as an Immigration Case Officer in a North London MP's constituency office. It's 'documentary' to the extent that documents are quoted or printed here. It is worth reading for the substance alone. Also, the people whose cases are represented, who (the publisher tells us) are 'composites' of real clients, would be difficult not to relate to. A gaggle of forlorn but often resilient fellow-humans, their idiosyncrasies give life to the book and ensure that it isn't a treatise. Mr Giang finds it hard to learn English: "He concentrates on the words / but as he stretches out to grasp them / they squawk out of reach" (Mr Giang); "You know Abdul, / a serial letter writer in green ink", Heron Flats; "Mahmood spent twelve years in England / hiding in a caravan with fruit pickers...He remembered / rain-grey fruit fused to the stems", Tangiers. One way or another Smith adds a touch ("rain-grey fruit") which clinches the kind of desolation stateless people suffer. Though these poems could be samey, Smith's narrative skill wins out in poems short and long. New email address is a one-liner: "LuckyinUK_@netnet.com". The Strange Tale of the Immigration Judge & the Carpet Seller of Kampala is a three-page Arabian Nights story, a rare case of a happy ending. Smith is punchy, satirical, persuasive and quite often lyrical. Is this poetry? It is writing which grapples with opposite pressures. In one way, it's like writing about a friend dying of cancer: the subject-matter seems 'entitled' to a hearing. Even before shaping, our response is 'ready-made'. On the other hand, this 'emotive' subject-matter is also laden with dry fact and reference to procedures. Smith's variety of approach to each case achieves a great deal. Sometimes we sense that the poet is 'searching for her own soul' rather than ours, which is perhaps the key to making this data-heavy material shape as poetry.

Caroline Smith’s The Immigration Handbook is a large-scale project, an attempt to tell the individual stories of people she has encountered as an asylum caseworker for an MP. It is attentive to others, and the specifics of their realities. Smith herself is largely invisible, to the point where some poems are ‘found’ (a legal apology, an adjudicator’s verdict, a letter from the Home Office printed with details blacked out: ‘I apologise for the delay in progressing your client’s application. // Due to the length of time that has elapsed since your client submitted her application the form is now out of date’.) Others feel verbatim, like one in the voice of ‘Ali’:

I have worked
maybe sixty hours this week
in a kitchen in Wembley.
I’ll be paid for five.
There is no one to complain to.

But this is generous poetry, and Smith is present in each careful, interested detail. Mint leaves twist in a tea glass ‘like fur caterpillars’. Mahmood ‘posts cigarette butts / into an empty Sprite bottle’. A carer is seen emptying a catheter and ‘blurting out the wet-nosed tube of his cream’. An answering machine’s messages ‘brim like the water butt / spilling over with black water’. A baby snores:

through its cleft palate,
dummy balanced on its lip,
thin sky-blue hood
pulled over its eyes.

The bureaucracy emerges as a black joke, and Smith manages to find humour, as in the misspellings of ‘Letters’:

I would like to express my filling
I love your cuntry
I have applied for neutralisation

Ultimately though, this is a book that makes us face our own unkindness. It does the important work of witnessing those whose pain we would rather not see.

What place is there for the delineation of ‘private’ experience in the face of shared public outrage or privation? T.S. Eliot’s contemplation of this subject in ‘The Dry Salvages’, a poem itself embroiled in the contexts of the Second World War, in particular the trans-Atlantic experience, suggests that ‘agony’ is as permanent as far as the nature of time allows it to be: ‘We appreciate this better / In the agony of others, nearly experienced, / Involving ourselves, than in our own.’ The diplomatic nuances of ‘nearly’ are at the heart of the matter: both ‘close up’, and ‘not quite’ co-exist in the adverb and its flickering suggests that it is not wrong to seek to learn from such proximate and yet elusive ‘experiences’.
Caroline Smith’s daring, intelligent and well-judged collection works in the spirit of Eliot’s lines. It is a collection which requires to be read entire, where each poem informs and re-adjusts our views of the growing sequence. Teh writing stems from the poet’s position as an asylum caseworker for a London MP and traces journeys into and sometimes through ‘the labyrinthine government bureaucracies’ encountered by the powerless. It thus explores the various language systems, narratives and viewpoints of victims, judges and witnesses working in a system. So we range from mechanical or heartless legalese to fragmentary lyrics to longer, often ‘open’ stories. Thus Smith’s abilities to allow the reader to weave a path through widely contrasting textures and sound systems are put to the test. Future readers of the collection are implored to read the whole thing, suspending isolated aesthetic judgements on shards or seeming facsimile takes on documentation in such a process.
For example, the titles of this sequence (‘Answer Machine’, ‘Apology’, ‘Judgements’, ‘The Strange Tale of the Immigration Judge and the Carpet Seller of Kampala’) which are close to the heart of the collection, give an indication of the range of viewpoints and likely language acts the reader will have to navigate. And that is part of the collection’s point: that we are constantly changing our minds, moving from one judgement or verdict to another. Smith’s job is to make this experience memorable and to lift it beyond a display of ‘found poems’. She does this with great success – and through the power of telling images. The messages on the answer machine ‘collect through the night, / brim like the water butt/ spilling over with black water.’ What is left unsaid here makes the connections we need to make all the more important. The abutting poem ‘Apology’ is a prose poem (an opaque, convoluted, arse-covering example of official-ese), but the notion of a wasted journey is indicated in the second sentence: ‘I would also apologise that Ms Bensoussan’s case has not been correctly routed within this office...’ lost, in other words. The following poem ‘Judgements’ is a masterly regurgitation of tautology, bet-hedging and linguistic contortion acts; here is part of it:

Similarly if the appellant claimed
the relevant matters did not happen I should not
exclude the possibility that they did not happen
(although believing that they probably did)
unless I had no real doubt that they did in fact happen.

Clear now? Its sinister undercurrent is worthy of Pinter and brought to mind Goldberg in ‘The Birthday Party’. The next poem, a long and superbly-handled narrative, (‘The Strange Tale of the Immigration Judge and the Carpet Seller of Kampala’) explores a haunting – a judge, after a long day ‘dispensing justice, despatching lives’, followed home by the persistent figure of Harun Al Rashid, the carpet seller. A tiny recollection (the apprentice’s first name, no spoilers here) makes the judge and thus the reader re-consider the whole tale that is like something out of Homer (Penelope and the suitors) or the ‘Arabian Nights’. Smith’s account rescues and makes memorable telling details:

...the Judge had seen that the man’s stiff fingers,
splayed out like a cockerel tail,
still remembered the pride of holding
a colourful swatch between them.

This is a wonderful embroiled simile in its own sound-mesh within the tall tale of the poem itself.
Smith’s ability to raise characters from the deadening hand of routine and cursory public self-justification and self-exoneration is to be applauded. Several of the poems stand alone (‘The Scarlet Lizard’, ‘Stamps’, ‘Lime Tree Honey’ and ‘Luck’ for example) and could be examined discretely, but that would be to miss the point: they exist in among the crowd of poems and documented fates around them from redacted letters to the final glossary of abbreviations. Similar to the fabulous carpet emporium of Harun Al Rashid, the collection is ‘a casket of silks/ conjured from a war-torn land’.

The Immigration Handbook collects together stories of people caught up in the unwieldy, impersonal and often seemingly illogical world of government bureaucracy. Not unlike the recently released I, Daniel Blake, such a bureaucracy is shown to brutalise those who depend on it the most.

Caroline Smith is perfectly placed to write these stories, having worked as an asylum caseworker for a London MP. In a recent interview in Eastern Eye, Smith explained:

“It’s called The Immigration Handbook because it comes at the issue of immigration from different people’s perspectives, whether it’s the immigration judge, the asylum seeker, or the case worker.”

This multiplicity of views is one of the main strengths of the book, and without it, the poems could have been unremittingly dark. As it is, many are suffused with a sense of hopelessness, which would be deeply troubling and upsetting were it not for Smith’s empathic listening and objectivity. Post-Brexit, this feels like a necessary project. Now more than ever, we need writers to draw attention to the human suffering behind the headlines and to challenge the often disturbing and extreme language that is used to describe migrants and refugees.

In the first poem of the book, ‘On Hold’ we are introduced to Arjan Mehta. This poem is short, and worth quoting in full, as it illustrates many of the key concerns explored throughout the collection.

On Hold

‘There is no timescale for dealing with this application’

He was just twenty-three
Arjan Mehta, when first he began
calling the Home Office
from a red phone box
on the corner of Preston Road;
would push against
and let fall behind him
the heavy creaking door,
into its stale, vacated, smoke smell,
stand on its concrete littered floor
his fingers twisting through
the plastic snake cord,
dragging round the metal dial,
eager about his application.
Seventeen years have passed
with no answer.
He is now forty.
The sealed-up phone box
long out of service,
the black cradle
within its sepulchre,
silent as an obsidian urn.

The poem opens a door onto a world that many people are not aware of, and simply asks you to look through. The language used is simplistic and factual, and the long opening sentence fits with the idea of being on hold, of things going on indefinitely. This is contrasted with the factual, short, sharp statement: ‘Seventeen years have passed / with no answer’.

Perhaps the most surprising thing I realised after reading this collection is that the pain of waiting for an answer that never comes, of having no home, or the possibility of having your home taken away, can be just as damaging as physical violence, and the haunting image of the sealed-up phone box at the end of this poem symbolises this brilliantly.

‘On Hold’ begins with an epigraph of ‘official’ text taken from communication with the Home Office. This technique of weaving in official text to use as part of poems or to serve as epigraphs occurs throughout the collection. Taking this strategy even further, a copy of an original letter from the Home Office appears in full, roughly halfway through the collection. This letter begins ‘I refer to your clients No Time Limit application which has been outstanding since 12 December 2006.’  The letter is dated 21 September 2015.

Smith makes the titles of her poems work hard. They often have two meanings – as in ‘On Hold’ with its literal meaning of being ‘on hold’ on the phone, and the secondary reference to the idea of someone’s life being on hold. In ‘The Jumper’ the reader begins by thinking that it refers to an item of clothing, as we read about a nurse who is caught stealing a jumper. She pays the price years later, when she is refused the right to stay because of the ‘criminal act’ committed in her youth. The poem finishes:

How she could see no other way –
how without her, they’d be allowed to stay.

Suddenly the title takes on a whole new meaning.

In another poem, ‘Omnipotence’, after reading lots of poems in the voice of an observer or an outsider, we are in the first person. An asylum case worker tells us:

He’d been bugging me all morning,
phoning insistently
so confident of his rights.
Just wanted the Home Office to hurry up –
but he was bolshie and I snapped.
Told him they were doing further checks,
had called up another file.
Then I heard his voice crumple and go small;
‘please don’t push them too hard then,
don’t make them angry,
I’ll leave it to time.’

Again, the title of the poem deepens the impact of the poem – and the sense of shame which comes from this moment of self-reflection on the part of the speaker is both startling and moving.

One of the things that keeps the collection fresh and surprising is the considered exploration of the viewpoints of those who work with and alongside migrants or refugees – various caseworkers, judges and officers operating within the constraints of the asylum system. The first two poems, exploring the lives of two different asylum seekers respectively are followed by ‘The Scarlet Lizard’, a different kind of poem altogether. This poem, is again spoken in the voice of an observer, but this time looking at a judge.  Here is the Judge, reading through a report:

He needed to sense some quiver of
indecision, an odd detail
that would open the truth of their words;
chinks of light shining
through shuttered doors.

And ‘Red Road Flats’ we read:

When the Presenting Officer heard of
their suicides following the ruling
it was as if he’d woken up
and found himself
a trespasser in his own garden.

People are not presented simplistically, and although the news of the suicides make the latter poem particularly dark, the exploration of the impact that this has on the people dealing with these cases is delicately drawn does alleviate the sense of hopelessness in a small way. Though the asylum system is inhuman, real people are part of it, and these people are also human beings who are compassionate and flawed and struggling to understand the situation they find themselves in.

The problem of writing other people’s stories is a difficult one, particularly when dealing with groups of people who have already been silenced time and time again. The position of witness is often difficult one to pull off because of the position the author must maintain as outsider, but Smith is successful here: she negotiates and avoids the pit of slipping into sentimentality and mawkishness. This collection explores this idea of ‘poetry as witness’ layering story after story of trauma and pain on top of each other in orderly way that is to be admired – in a shocking poem, Smith factually recounts how a middle child of three is sent home because he is the only one in his family that doesn’t have a visa.

If I could wish for anything else it would have been for a few more poems exploring the impact of working with refugees/asylum seekers in the first person so that there was more of a range of tone throughout the collection. However, this is a small quibble – I found the book moving, disturbing and revelatory in its exposure of the intricacies of the immigration system.

This review was first published online by the Created to Read blog and can be read here. 

The Immigration Handbook is an impressive collection which varies in tone and style. Smith uses simple language, small details and powerful imagery to present to us the extraordinary lives of ordinary people, caught up in situations beyond their control. As the asylum caseworker for a London based MP, she has spent years helping immigrants to navigate the complexities of an underfunded, overstretched bureaucratic system.   

Throughout the book there is an underlying sense of irony, alongside a sensitivity and poignancy that brings into sharp relief the tragedy of a woman who discovers that her beloved “Turkish prince” simply wanted a visa, and the story of a man who “…spent twelve years in England / hiding in a caravan with fruit pickers…” only to be faced with a stark choice:

“He had almost made it to fourteen years,
when they’d have given him his papers,
let him stay –
but he’d got a message from home
that his mother was dying –
and he’d had to choose.”

In many of the poems we encounter the clash of disparate worlds, such as in ‘Domestic Worker’ when “Esta Cunha de Silva”, is reminded of “the favelas, the depleted rainforest” whilst making a rhubarb pie, or the contrast, in ‘Mr Giang’, between his ability to speak “sixty-two / Vietnamese bird languages” and his struggle to make sense of English:

“The echolalia of foreign sounds
stutter stubbornly in his throat,
catching on stumps of charred,
defoliated forest
that emit only the ghostly
calling of the gibbons
and the breathless whistles of the birds.”

We also see the plain, unadorned horror of sudden deportation, for example in the prose poem, ‘Removal Directions’, as we observe a young woman who becomes physically ill with the shock of finally being deported, and the detached voice of the officer: “I arrested her at 06.20 hours as a person liable to be detained.”

Detachment is another theme which runs through the collection, emphasising the brutality of a system that treats human beings as cases, and the feeling of helplessness in the face of bureaucracy. The brevity and objective language of ‘Father’, for example, actually made me cry, to think of someone faced with such a humiliating and heart-breaking situation:

“but DNA tests show that
only two of his children are his.
The middle one has been refused a visa.”

But Smith also portrays the stress and strain of those involved in making these decisions. We delve, for a brief moment, into the mind of a caseworker as he sits, “checking this man’s documents / for illegal working” whilst reminiscing on his own decision to migrate to the UK. We glimpse the thoughts of “the Presenting Officer” in ‘Red Road Flats’ as, faced with news of “their suicides” he regrets his decision:

“What he had dismissed as paranoid, he
now saw from within their world as real,”

Each person involved in this process is presented as an individual. I particularly like the way in which the work of a solicitor, in ‘Pro Bono 1’ and ‘Pro Bono 2’, is depicted as that of an artist:

“he must place words carefully:
uncover details, minute inflections
that will capture her suffering…”

Poems such as ‘Judgements’ and ‘Apology’ emphasise the absurdity of a bureaucratic system far too complex to achieve anything in reasonable time. In fact, the collection begins with a poem which highlights just how tragic and preposterous our asylum system can be. ‘On hold’ presents us with Arjan Mehta, a man who has waited seventeen years for a response to his asylum claim, and is still waiting.

Other poems tell us stories of compassion and hope, from Abdul Rahman in ‘Heron Flats’ who is grateful to his boss for giving him a chance, to the “sudden deep snowfall” in ‘Luck’ which “grounded all flights” so that “Mr Owusu’s deportation… / is unexpectedly cancelled.”

The Immigration Handbook brings us people from all walks of life, facing intense, tragic, horrific, funny, paradoxical and challenging situations. There is every human emotion here, from resignation and regret, to defiance and tenderness. We see the people behind the headlines, and we rejoice and mourn alongside them. This collection not only moves the heart, but reveals to us the hidden stories of those who do not have a voice of their own.