Alison Brackenbury reviews Look We Have Coming to Dover by Daljit Nagra

I took this book to Lapland. Its red cover smouldered by heated gloves, under roofs with a metre of snow. I greeted the blurb’s boast, “much awaited”, not with the reviewer’s frozen snarl but the reader’s thawed smile. I have indeed waited for this collection, tracking stray poems through the snowy pages of magazines. It is a book to fill a gap.

But Daljit Nagra is ahead of me.

Did you make me for the gap in the market
Did I make me for the gap in the market-

The sweep, like a searchlight, from “you” to “I”, singing in its rhythm, is typical of Nagra’s strengths, a poetry of clear eyes, compassion, and challenge:

Can I cream off awards from your melting-pot phase?

“Melting-pot” is not, I agree, our society’s best metaphor. I offer no replacement, only a few thoughts, lit by this book, of the limits and reach of our poems. We cannot go to poetry, as to good journalism, for facts. As Nagra’s dazzle of many voices reminds us, we cannot trust that poems are autobiography. But the exuberant untruthfulness of poetry melts into insight. Out of Nagra’s poems flash a multitude of stories which would only be brief gleams in conversations, allusions by my neighbour to her childhood in the Punjab or by my daughter’s Westernised friends to conflicts with loved parents.

Nagra stands between these generations. With anger and wit, he mediates between their lives and those of his readers. His stories have many echoes. The new arrival’s disillusion, sleeping on his “panel of chip wood on the bath”, flows out into memories of Irish poverty in London, and into the latest reports of Polish workers, crammed in damp farm sheds. The reader is drawn, sensuously, inside experience. The groom force-fed at a ceremony of arranged marriage endures “the mash of their beads/ on my gritted teeth.”

Metaphor, rightly, dissolves seamlessly into life in Nagra’s poems. His real comic gift springs from complexity. “For the Wealth of India” carries an epigraph from Marlowe. (Nagra consistently blends his learning into his lines with a light hand.) It is the breathless monologue of a Westernised bride on a shopping trip to India, haggling hard:

Daddy would applaud if he wasn’t
slogging at the concrete factory.

The tour closes with a characteristic whirl of wit. “Back to Britain! /Get us out of here!”

Richly rueful, Nagra’s poems can celebrate India in Britain in choked and luscious lines, crammed with food: “flamingo-pink syrup-tunnelled/ jalebis”. His gentler comedy is freed by a fine ear, as in the crooning vowels of a father’s dream of return home, “Soothing/ his engine by the cesspool”. But he can turn unflinchingly upon violence and vandalism. The dense language which caresses rich goods, a shop-keeping family’s“champagne-gold” car, flows on relentlessly to its destruction:

watching the car-skin pucker, bubbling smarts
of acid.

“The unstoppable pub-roar/ from the John O’Gaunt” brings to Nagra’s readers, with a new and bitter power, the darker echoes of the “sceptred isle”, while a brief telegraphic poem, X, holds ghosts from Guatanamo:

u hood my head

X is, I fear, a poem which will remain necessary. Its bareness hints at Nagra’s varied technical strengths. Will he use the power of traditional English forms as a counterpoint to fresh subjects? This book suggests he is too wise to ignore them.

Does poetry ignore most people? Certainly it ignores the kind of “slogging” work at which most people spend much of their lives. Britain’s poetry knows little of its business, especially, (the majority), small businesses . These, with their quiet tyranny and vicious family politics, are true common ground, neglected and familiar as the corner shop.

I run just one ov my daddy’s shops
from 9 o’clock to 9 o’clock-

My favourite, final poem in this book, “Singh Song!” bounces in a young shop-keeper, intoxicated with his new bride, with outrageous rhymes “chutney/Putney” and a deft chorus of outraged customers “di worst Indian shop/ on di whole Indian road”.

The lovers, and Nagra’s lyricism, are unchecked.

“vee cum down whispering stairs
and sit on my silver stool..
vee stare past di half-price window signs
at di beaches ov di UK in di brightey moon-”

Nagra’s free-flowing coinages remind me, briefly, of older English song “on a shiny night”. Arnold, of course, is here too, for ever frozen on Dover Beach, eloquently despairing. But Singh, and Nagra’s singing poem, do not despair. How do people survive the crumbling of faith, violent prejudices, grinding work? Because, at times, our lives melt to happiness, as Nagra’s last poem melts into air

“Is priceless baby”-

Take this book anywhere.

Look We Have Coming to Dover!, Faber, 2007, 64pp, £8.99. ISBN 978 0 571 23122 5

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.