Yiewsley - by Daljit Nagra (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A spirited and stirring return to the poet's boyhood and the town that made him

This autobiographical collection explores Daljit Nagra's experiences growing up in the white, working-class suburban town of Yiewsley close to Heathrow airport in Outer London, from the 1960s to 80s. As Britain transitions from a postwar manufacturing economy to the Thatcher period and the computer age, we see a young boy navigating childhood friendships and mishaps. The poems bring to life a bustling house filled with relatives from India who arrived, legally or otherwise, in the UK: 'devout realists - already, and always, knuckled into work'. They also offer powerful insight into the makings of the writer: the 'messy English' at home fusing with Bollywood ballads, Top of the Pops and hymns at school, to develop a voice entirely his own.

Review Quotes

"[Nagra's poems] do that rare thing in poetry of stretching language, making it do things it hasn't done before. It's multiculturalism at its most complex, individual and real." - Scotland on Sunday

"A book of guts and heart, an honest, often polemical collection that posits worn-on-the-sleeve, personal and public questions without implying simple answers." - TLS, on British Museum