The Cheering Rain
Kate Adams

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About the book:

In The Cheering Rain, Kate Adams draws on her experience of working with refugees to create a patchwork of stories. Trapped and frustrated by faceless institutions and unfathomable systems, her voice is joined by the characters she has known. Filled with humour, warmth and courage, these poems remind us of the incredible limits of human endurance, and of the cruel machinery that changes lives in the twenty-first century.

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About the author:

Kate Adams migrated from Hackney, East London in search of a better life after many years spent living with chronic illness. In 2006 she became involved with Kent Refugee Help, a charity providing casework assistance to immigration detainees in Dover; and also completed a foundation course in counselling at the Refugee Therapy Centre in North London. Her year at the Refugee Therapy Centre encouraged creative introspection and allowed a flow of poems to emerge, sparked by her close connection with refugees and migrants.

Her motivation in writing is to find and convey an emotional truth and to collaborate with those who traditionally have no voice in society. She has encouraged former detainees in the production of their own poetry and art work. This has included poetry events in Canterbury and art exhibitions in Whitstable and Birmingham.

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“These poems convey fragments of memory and communication, those glimpses of broken lives, which are poignant, painful, and yet precious, for those who are in the limbo of exile. Kate Adams has a remarkable eye for the telling detail, and a sensitive ear for voices seeking to express themselves in an alien language. She has the gift of evoking experiences of other worlds, other lives and experiences, without distancing them, making them a part of her life and ours.”

Lyn Innes, Emeritus Professor of Postcolonial Literatures, University of Kent

“They are so wonderfully economical these poems, elegant, understated and quietly poignant, a few well-chosen words to conjure up whole vistas, whole countries, whole days, whole lives, with an eye for the small detail which seems to open up some echo of hidden emotion. It is the measure of a good poem that it stays with you like a song. I’ve been singing these poems in my head ever since I first read them.”

- CJ Stone, author and columnist

“Opening Kate Adams’ exhilarating first collection is like emerging from a dark alleyway into the noise and colour of an African street market… but they are in her own country, England. She works on behalf of refugees and she is passionately involved with the people she works for.”

- Hubert Moore, poet and writing mentor for refugees

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Excerpt:

Riviera Hotel

Here it’s warm and dry. Outside,
the rain has dyed the sky indigo and grey.
He stands before the last two guests,
deferential in his formal suit, as if born to this.

Unlike the two North Africans who run
the chip shop in the town he won’t
stand out and shout in alien language.
He talks in perfect English,

I think it’s clearing up now.

The rain is his and jagged sunshine
on the bay, the daily view as he inspects the menus,
checks the glasses, reassuring duties
that stabilize a man in this capricious climate.

It is his kingdom and that other place, the land
of fire and cloud exists more in imagination.
A place where dark indigenous men
are segregated.

Revisiting he found with disappointment
a lack of something he had learned to like:
brown, salty, spread on toast
each early shift.

No substitute for Marmite.

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Additional Information:

ISBN 978-0-9563137-7-5
49 page paperback
Language: English
Publication Date: 31.03.2012