Look We Have Coming to Dover!
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"'This is visceral, life-affirming poetry'. Guardian"
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Independent - one of the ten best new poetry collections
'Fresh, funny and riotously idiosyncratic ... A glorious testament to a rich British-Indian mix.'
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
is priceless baby,
By oldbillie (London) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Look We Have Coming to Dover! (Paperback)
I picked up a copy of this in a bookshop and started flipping through it. Half an hour later I'd read it from cover to cover, to the annoyance of everyone in the bookshop, after which I felt obliged buy it. I even did so despite Faber's extortionate demand for nine quid. Should have waited and got it on Amazon.
Anyway, it's cracking stuff. Nagra's the real deal. I confess that most modern poetry makes my teeth ache with boredom because it's so earnest and glum and 'look-how-cleverly-I-put-that!'. Nagra's stuff isn't. It has verve and charm and soul, it's noisy and rude and very funny. He speaks -- or rather, his characters speak -- in a whole variety of voices: teenage Jaswinder who wishes she was black and chilled, querulous Kabba laying into his son's English teacher ('my boy, vil he tink ebry new/Barrett-home Muslim hav goat blood-party/barbeque?') and Singh who runs 'di worst Indian shop/ on di whole Indian road', and spends all his time upstairs with his 'newly bride'. Nagra has invented an amazing demotic here, a loud comic blend of Punjabi and English. Although many of the poems dwell on darker themes -- racism, oppression, arranged marriages -- the prevailing tone is one of exuberance and charm, as exemplified by the first and last poems of the collection. I always enjoy poetry with a touch of fiction or drama about it -- the sort that introduces characters and makes them come alive, and tells stories or at least parts of stories, and keeps us entertained. Most of Nagra's poems do exactly that. I reckon he'd make a pretty good playwright too -- or stand-up comedian. Though I hope he keeps writing poetry and that lots of people buy it. By the way, I'm not one of Nagra's pupils. Never heard of him before today. But I bet his classes are interesting.
39 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Yes We Have Daljit Nagra Review!,
By Shiv Singh Leone (England) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Look We Have Coming to Dover! (Paperback)
Every so often you read a dread description about a writer, that they are representative of something more than themselves, that they bring to voice a collective experience and history of some kind. Usually this sort of thing is too heavy a burden to place on them; it contains an inherent pomposity, or is a sign of the mediocre talent that seeks to assert the relevance of their writing by claiming a higher social or collective significance. This kind of assignation of importance must be resisted because it can so easily elevate novelty over truly individual talent or original work. It can become a burden to a writer who is then assigned the task of `representing' their `people' for the benefit of others, rather than being true to the intimate engagement with their own artistry, the individual nuance and eye that makes a true writer. So, I have spent days trying to stop myself from saying what I am about to say, but as much as I try to fight it, I have to speak the truth as I see it and declare that Daljit Nagra's debut collection represents in poetry an aesthetic and literary consummation of forty years of British-Indian, specifically British Punjabi-Sikh life, and represents the most creative and original engagement with the English language by any British Asian writer working today. It had to come from a poet eventually, because poetry is where attention to language, rhythm, form, metaphor, simile and tempo is most concentrated and intense. Making the language new, by using it to describe and engage with new experience. So here it is then, a collection in which English and Punjabi (both language and sensibility) are not so much melting into each other as exciting one another in a flirtatious and playful mingling. 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 line. Paul Muldoon is the most obvious influence, but the patience, comedy, sense of humour, sensitivity, pathos, the miscegenation of language, the by turns stillness and exuberance of the poems is unique and Nagra's own brew. They made me feel sad, made me giggle aloud (often within a few lines of a single poem), and excited me as you must be excited when a writer declares that he will take Matthew Arnold as inspiration and render his experience and, by gentle implication, the milieu and background from which he comes, into literature and life. That he will not be assimilated by language or tradition, but will embrace it, and memorialise his Punjabi-tinted memory and his private English landscape to make a space for himself and bring to word a world that was missing, invisible or misunderstood, until somehow it was brought into poetry, into art.
4 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
perfection,
By
This review is from: Look We Have Coming to Dover! (Paperback)
Last year I purchased a poem entitled `oh my rub' by Daljit Nagra, and it was so refreshing that I immediately became a fan. Earlier this year, I was informed that he was in the process of releasing a collection of poems, which excited me, beyond belief. I was so overly enamored that I reserved a copy on Amazon months before the release. Let's get one thing straight from the off. Daljit Nagra's `look we have coming to Dover!' is a work of genius. The question is not to question its genius, but to question what type of genius it represents. Or the question could be couched thus: Why do you, dear reader, read? Is it for the idealism, or for the reality? The answer is probably going to be "a bit of both". That's what I was looking for. So, with `look we have coming to Dover!' here's the rub; yes, the use of language, the memorable phrases, the story's, all these are without question dazzling. I recently took a trip to Monaco with my fiancé, we found a quaint Deli/café were we sat there reading Nagra's work whilst drinking the most terrific wine, and indulged into some fine `foie gras'. My advice to you, is buy this masterpiece, and hope for more.
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