Yiewsley

<p><b>A spirited and stirring return to the poet’s boyhood and the town that made him<br></b><br>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, <i>Top of the Pops</i> and hymns at school, to develop a voice entirely his own.<br><br>‘[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.’ <i>Scotland on Sunday</i><br><br>‘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.’ <i>TLS</i>, on<i> British Museum</i></p>