📱 eBook en inglés YIEWSLEY

A spirited and stirring return to the poets boyhood and the town that made him


This autobiographical collection explores Daljit Nagras 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.

[Nagras poems] do that rare thing in poetry of stretching language, making it do things it hasnt done before. Its 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