Oxford Spires Academy is about as far from our idea of the dreaming spires as you can get. OK, it is in Oxford. But this is working class Oxford in the industrial east of the city and the OSA is a comprehensive school with a majority of migrant and refugee children on its roll. They are a varied bunch, coming from Europe, Africa, Asia, South America. According to Kate Clanchy this is a strength. There are so many ethnicities, over thirty distinct languages, maybe 50 dialects. Thus no one group dominates and everybody makes friends across religious and ethnic divides, perhaps best exemplified by Kate’s examples of a Brazilian named Jesus playing basketball with an Afghani called Mohammed or the Syrian and Iranian girls holding hands and sharing cherries, oblivious to the Shia-Sunni divide.

Another strength is Kate, who has spent many years working with the dedicated teaching staff at OSA as writer residence, supported by the Forward Arts Foundation. Her method is simple. In an after school club she and the students read poems together. Then they write poems. They read their work together, take it away, redraft it, polish it. This book contains a selection of the finished poems. It will take your breath away.

In her introduction Kate reflects on why the project has been so successful. She praises the students and the English department at OSA. Crucially she identifies that,

there is another factor at work here: that of language loss and change. The poets represented here all came to English, or at least written English, late, after they were six: each student here, whether because of migration, deafness or dyslexia, went through a period when they lost their native language, and, as Rukiya Khatun so memorably puts it, ‘silence itself was my friend’. That locked-down period may be painful, but it feeds the inner voice.

This prompts my only criticism of this anthology. A fifth of all the pupils are white British. Where is their poetry? Perhaps there is another volume in the works. I hope so. Part of the problem with Brexit here and other populist movements elsewhere is that, rightly or wrongly, natives feel otherly in their own land. They may not have experienced the same horrors as some of the children in this volume – I was five years old/hiding under the bed/listening to the footsteps/of the approaching soldiers/who had weapons//that could tear my limbs/like a lions jaw is the opening to one poem by Azfa Awad – but they too have experienced loss and dislocation as the old certainties fade in post industrial Britain. They need poetry too.

That is not to distract from the achievement of these young poets or the power and authenticity of their work. I have just opened the book at random to give you this one poem by Halema Malak. She is the only girl in a house of brothers who came here from Afghanistan when she was ten. She wrote this poem when she was 14.

Ghazal: Wings

I saw that I had been transformed into a crow with wings.
There were feathers as black as death along my wings.

Why, said crow-girl, why are my feathers black, colour of death?
Where are the white feathers that covered my wings?

I am flying high over my country, over the Hindu Kush
mountains, over my village, on my wings.

I see the grey landscape, the grey towns, the green trees
near the mountains. I feel the grey mountains under my wings.

I see the grave of my father, who I never knew,
I, Halema, on my black wings.

It is a beautiful book. It reminds me of what I wrote after seeing Joan Baez in concert. With one song she rips your heart out. With the next one she restores it stronger than before. Buy this book.