Look We Have Coming To Dover!

Daljit Nagra

Journey

There you go
with your rucksack of clean clothes
and a flat rose in your notepad
wandering for the dream you had
where all the things you spilled
were back in their bottles, brighter
than ever…

Look We Have Coming to Dover! is the long-awaited debut collection from prize-winning poet Daljit Nagra. The collection represents forty years of British-Indian, specifically British Punjabi-Sikh life, in the UK and represents the most creative and original engagement with the English language by any British Asian writer working today.

The collection, in which English and Punjabi mingle, helps to offer an insight of a Punjabi Asian growing up in today’s UK. This is an England never represented so originally before, the life of working class British Sikhs and Indians, their travails, sadness, guilty memories, joyful exuberance, subdued melancholy. The racket and sheer comedy of British Punjabi life is evoked so intimately in many of the poems, the poignancy of inter-generational pain and misunderstanding sketched perfectly, the deep blue of the immigrant and the children of immigrant's lives put in phrase and Nagra's unique language style.

Daljit Nagra was born and raised in West London, then Sheffield, and currently lives in Willesden where he works in a secondary school. ‘Look We Have Coming to Dover!’ won the Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem in 2004 and was described as ‘a poem of contemporary resonance which engages playfully and powerfully with our literary heritage’.