Yiewsley by Daljit Nagra

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

This autobiographical collection candidly explores Daljit Nagra’s experiences growing up from the sixties to the eighties in the predominantly white working-class town of Yiewsley, close to Heathrow airport in Outer London. As Britain transitions from a post-war manufacturing economy to the Thatcher years 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 had 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