Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

In 2000 the government’s ‘dispersal’ policy came into force: asylum
seekers are housed in cities in northern England, Scotland and Wales until their cases are decided – at which point they cease to be ‘asylum seekers’ and become either ‘refugees’ or ‘failed asylum seekers’.

   Swansea Bay Asylum Seekers Support Group was established by
concerned locals to resist the climate of hostility and offer a practical
welcome. The committee now consists in roughly equal parts of asylum seekers, refugees and others. We have received some project grants, but our core work – running drop-ins, providing emotional and practical support to ‘dispersees’, who now number around 900 in Swansea – is not funded. We raise money through benefit events, and above all through publications. I created the imprint Hafan Books (‘hafan’, Welsh: sanctuary) in order to publish a 96-page anthology of poetry and prose, launched in Refugee Week, June 2003, with a big shindig at the Dylan Thomas Centre.
Between a Mountain and a Sea was jointly edited by Eric Ngalle Charles, a Cameroonian refugee poet, Sylvie Hoffmann, a French-born artist and writer, and me. We all solicited work from friends and acquaintances, and persuaded others to translate as necessary (notably from Arabic and Farsi). Sylvie ran informal workshops-cum-English-classes with French-speaking asylum seekers, helping them turn observations of life in Swansea into brief, pungent poems in English.

   Between a Mountain and a Sea includes work by more than 25 newcomers to Wales. Only one had already had work published: Abdalla Bashir-Khairi, a Sudanese writer whose nightmarish stories of Islamist tyranny appeared in Arabic in Qatar. Other texts are by refugees of longer standing: a Jewish Austrian who fled to Britain in 1938, a Chilean poet who came to Swansea in 1975, a Kurdish Iraqi who had been in the UK since the early 90s. We also published translations of 9th-century Welsh exiles’ laments, and new poems by established Wales-based writers including Menna Elfyn.

   The run of 1500 sold out (hundreds of copies were given away to asylum seekers). In June 2004 we produced a second book, Nobody’s Perfect. Again about 25 asylum seekers and refugees write. Several people we coaxed into writing for the first book produced new work: they are developing distinctive writing voices. We encouraged yet more first-time writers, and we published stories and poems by the Algerian exile Soleïman Adel Guémar in translation.

   Readers tell us that the books are eye-opening. For the
contributors, the experience is fulfilling. Nobody gets paid. All proceeds (so far around £2000) go to SBASSG and to the Welsh Refugee Council’s Hardship Fund, which supports growing numbers of ‘failed asylum seekers’. Their ‘failures’ are mostly due to want of legal advice; they can claim no benefits or housing; they are not allowed to work; but they usually can’t be deported.

   At www.hafan.org the full contents of Between a Mountain and a Sea can be accessed, and Nobody’s Perfect can be ordered. There will be further Hafan publications.