Daljit Nagra & Nick Laird

Feature by Nine | 15 Aug 2007

Born in London to Punjabi parents, Daljit Nagra is aware that his poetry fills a certain ‘gap in the market.’ In acknowledging his potential to be typecast, he ponders whether it’s his own doing or whether this pigeonholing is shaped by exterior forces. His work alternates between the humorous and the thought-provoking. He examines his own experiences, shaped by race, class and geography and he takes on the voices of different characters: immigrants to England; the Sikh man in the corner shop. At times the deliberate parody in some of his poems rings hollow, and his work impresses most when he depicts more serious issues.

Nick Laird is captivating from the start. Born in Tyrone in 1975, the Troubles are inextricably linked with his personal history. Occasional references remind us that moving away has not erased these formative experiences: “I heard the bomb at Teebane in which a friend died / and in Brixton once, fucking someone else, / a car backfired unexpectedly and I began to sob.” But this is by no means his central subject matter; Laird’s talent is in expressing the beauty found in the ordinary. He describes his wariness of people who write poems about their pets, before launching into a eulogy for his pug. His verses on marriage, "The Art of War" could, as implied by the title, resort to cliché, but he ventures beyond the predictable gender divide to present struggles that are simply human.