Yiewsley

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.


'[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