The Émigrée by Carol Rumens: what it is about, its context, and how Rumens uses language, form and structure.
Key quotations and how to analyse them, and the poems in the cluster it compares well with, with similarities and differences.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'There once was a country', 'I left it as a child', 'It may be at war, it may be sick with tyrants', 'the bright, filled paperweight', 'I comb its hair and love its shining eyes', 'My city takes me dancing through the city / of walls', 'They accuse me of absence', 'My city hides behind me', 'evidence of sunlight'.
Form: a first-person exile's voice, the city personified, and the repeated sunlight.
Context: Carol Rumens's poem of 1993, and a city that is never named.
Comparisons with Tissue, Checking Out Me History and Kamikaze.
