I no longer look at the photographs from my year as a teacher in Namibia; they seem like false memories and I cannot work out whether it is myself or the pervasive orange light that looks more out of place. I have an impulse to delete the pictures permanently. My poems were prompted, I believe, by that impulse, or in hope of countering what often seemed a favourable blankness by at some level replicating it.

That impulse or something like it was also the main reason I took no photographs when I spent the summer of 2016 as a volunteer in the refugee camps on the Greek island of Chios. There were, of course, other reasons, some of which have informed the poems I ended up writing. Unlike the Namibian poems, which required significant reshaping (they all began as fourteen lines), the Chios poems have scarcely changed from the forms in which they came to me. For example, not a single one of the Namibian poems has kept its original opening, while in the Chios poems none of the first lines has been altered. When it came to editing, I realised, however, that the sensibility behind the poems is the same.

There were other constants: sand kept appearing in the Namibian poems, sea in the Chios ones. But my two attempts to write more conventional ‘landscape’ poems, set in Namibia, were failures. They lacked feeling; lacked, too, a fundamental ‘otherness’.

I am no longer directly in touch with the children or the teachers from the school in Namibia; an email exchange with one of the children, initiated four years after I had left, soon petered out. I do follow my friends from Chios on social media, but have found it hard to write to them as I move with a European’s privilege to yet another NGO job while they remain on the island or (most of them by now, thankfully) in camps in Germany. I doubt that either they nor my Namibian friends will ever see this book, and even if they did, I am not sure what the poems would mean to them. The names in the poems are real but do not correspond to actual people. Nevertheless, I want these poems to be for the actual people, my way of keeping in touch despite the erasures and the ‘otherness’.