Rice & Rain

by Romalyn Ante

Rice & Rain is very rich and very distinct.

“Romalyn Ante's poems are exquisitely detailed and a real feast for the senses. She has an instinctive talent for crafting precise and finely-tuned poetry that captures the exact sensations – potent, close to home and as incisive and accurate as a scalpel's first cut. Whether it is the sun's rays that ‘infiltrated your bones, filling them with gold’, or the heart which breaks open like a pomegranate, ‘the seeds, / rusty-red like rivets, / contour a constellation’, life's preciousness is measured here carefully in its proximity to death. These poems are gracefully poised and balanced perfectly, alive with their own irresistible songs of love and longing.” —Jane Commane

“Rice & Rain is an impressive first collection of poems that take us from the Philippines to Cannock Chase. The poems are confidently written – Romalyn Ante’s surprising and original imagery shows us how to fatten a boy with the boiled water from rice-rinsing; a handbag mirror made from solidified gin; cornflake sunsets.
“Her poems explore sickness and separation – the longing for the sour-sweet taste of home – but there is also emphasis on nurturing and nourishment. With many references to food from ‘sheen pieces of bullet tuna wrapped in banana leaves’ to ‘luggage stuffed with sun-dried squid’ it is a book you feel you could almost eat.” —Jane Seabourne

Genres: Poetry

36 pages, Paperback

First published August 7, 2017

About the author

Romalyn Ante was born in 1989 in Lipa Batangas, Philippines. She was 16 years old when her mother – a nurse in the NHS – brought the family to the UK. Her debut pamphlet, Rice & Rain, won the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet 2018. She is the winner of the Poetry London Clore Prize 2018; joint-winner of the Manchester Poetry Prize 2017, and the recipient of the Platinum Poetry in Creative Future Literary Awards 2017. She currently lives in Wolverhampton, West Midlands, where she works as a registered nurse and psychotherapist.

Reviews

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

Images from this pamphlet have stayed with me since finishing - always a brilliant sign. It ranges from the visceral (medical and life-and-death situations) through the natural, images of flowers sitting next to needle scabs and bruises.

The language is precise and the order of poems in the collection leaves space for each to develop while building connections throughout; I felt a strong sense of a shift of tone in the latter half, as the poems seem to move from past to present and to explore connections to family in all their fraught possibilities. This last is something the poet does especially well, presenting family relationships, questions of identity and origins in ways which seem both fresh and archetypal, while maintaining a lovely specificity (a grandfather's brittle fingers and cracked lips, or parental disputes externalised on to household objects).

This is a brilliant first publication which I'm really glad to have picked up.

[Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rice & Rain is Romalyn Ante's first pamphlet, winning the Saboteur award in 2018 for best poetry pamphlet, and has since been followed in 2020 by Ante's debut collection, Antiemetic for Homesickness (which is also brilliant).

I really enjoyed Rice & Rain. I've read it a few times; most recently in a single sitting. It follows Ante growing up in the Philippines before living and working in the UK, with a focus on family and Filipino culture. The poems set in the Philippines conjure vivid imagery of the place. As someone who has lived in that fantastic country, there were a lot of moments that took me back, such as the spiders in matchboxes, to name one.

Compared to Antiemetic for Homesickness there is less familiarity with the UK, but this makes sense as it charts the narrator as a new arrival finding their feet in the UK.

There's an efficiency in Ante's work that make the poems powerful yet approachable. There's no waste or excess fat on these poems. Each line adding to the rich tapestry of colour, taste and feeling that Ante evokes as she tells her story.

This is a pamphlet to savour and return to.

[Dale Parnell · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a melancholic beauty to this collection that really touched me. Whilst I haven't emigrated to a different country, I do live away from my family, and many of the poems about childhood memories and facing illness in close family members stirred up very powerful emotions. There is, to me, a sadness that comes through without asking for your pity or asking you cheer up the author. She has accepted it as a part of life, and there is a maturity to those reflections of family, especially coming to terms with death and loss.
There are some wonderful, unexpected phrases in here, a view of the world and indeed a unique frame of reference that I found fascinating.
I've read this collection twice in as many days and I am sure that I will be reading it again, many times over.
A wonderful collection of genuine, moving poems.