Choose Love

Key Stage: KS3 Subject area: Health and Wellbeing, Key themes: Refugee experience, real lives, poetry The core of the collection was written in 2018 as part of a project with the charity Refugee Trauma Initiative. With the permission of both individual refugees and aid workers, RTI shared with Nicola a number of true and poignant stories which were then used as the basis for shortform poems. Over the following years Nicola has added to this core of poems to create a coherent collection on the theme of forced migration, its wider causes and consequences. -- Publisher: Graffeg Choose Love is a beautifully produced collection of poems by Nicola Davies, featuring illustrations by Petr Horáček. As an incredibly prolific author for children, Davies is experienced in keeping her message direct, simple, and emotive for younger readers. While not explicitly a children’s book, Choose Love is as simple and direct as the title implies; the phrase acts as both a call to action and a reference to the refugee charity with which Davies worked in the book’s creation. The sentiment of choosing love resonates throughout the poems in the collection and is as suitable for younger readers as it is for the more mature. There is no age limit on compassion and empathy. Loosely following the journey of a refugee, the book contains three brief sections entitled ‘Departure’, ‘Arrival’, and ‘Healing’. The effect of this is to build a narrative that humanises the refugee experience and creates a relatable description of different elements of life leading to the seeking of asylum. At a time when the press is endlessly full of antagonistic articles that reduce the plight of refugees to politicised statistics and turns them into problems to be dealt with, this book is more important than ever. Davies has taken her experience of working directly with refugees to counter the ‘othering’ of the media and places the reader in a position where it’s hard to remain anything but open and sympathetic. In ‘Five Minutes’, Davies deals with the decisions made quickly when leaving home: ‘You’ve got five minutes, what will you choose From all that you’re about to lose? You’ve got five minutes to fill your arms, When the city shrieks with fire alarms.’ The power of Davies’s directness continues in ‘Mathematics’, a poem that mimics the format of a school maths puzzle. ‘Two hundred on a tiny boat / Forty drowned when it won’t float.’ She goes on, ‘Countless corpses in the sea / This is the maths of misery.’ Two highlights of this book are ‘The Interview’ and ‘Hope’. The former paints a picture of an asylum seeker’s ‘substantive interview’, the moment when the reasons for asylum are examined and scrutinised. It manages to be both educational and illuminating about those on either side of the table. The latter reads as an experience of a teacher witnessing a moment of frustration that results in a glimmer of hope for a refugee child in the form of a green sprout from a sunflower seed. Horáček’s illustration for ‘Hope’ is representative of the style throughout the book and adds to the power of the words. His style is impressionistic, and with ‘Hope’ the smallest smear of green on grey is enough to strengthen Davies’s message. Together, the poems and illustrations make this book as beautiful as it is powerful. Choose Love should be widely read and shared. Its message holds as much power for good as the organisation it’s been written to support. -- Liam Nolan @ www.gwales.com