indiom

by Daljit Nagra

This East-meets-West hybrid work combines playful cavort with serious comment.

A cast of ‘Indic-heritage poets’ meets to perform poems and discuss the future of poetry. indiom engages eclectic, often Rabelaisian styles on subjects as various as the Indian poet Nissim Ezekiel, Shakespearean comedy, Under Milk Wood , The Simpsons and Newcastle United.

Daljit Nagra’s mock epic scrutinises the legacies of Empire and issues such as power and status, casteism and colourism, mimicry and mockery. What is Britishness now? How can humour help us survive hardship? The result is a capacious ‘talkie’/poem/play of resistance and redress whose ludic structures defy a story of intertextual and misplaced identities, gods and miracles, celluloid tragedy and blushing romantic desire amid an awkwardly rolling cricket ball and rioting poodles.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Hardcover

Published November 14, 2023

About the author

Daljit Nagra has published four poetry collections with Faber & Faber. He has won the Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem and Best First Collection, the South Bank Show Decibel Award and the Cholmondeley Award. His books have been nominated for the Costa Prize and twice for the T. S. Eliot Prize, and he has been selected as a New Generation Poet by the Poetry Book Society. He is the inaugural Poet-in-Residence for Radio 4 & 4 Extra, and presents a weekly programme, Poetry Extra, on Radio 4 Extra. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was elected to its Council, and is a trustee of the Arvon Trust. He has judged many prizes including the Samuel Johnson Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Costa Prize, the David Cohen Prize and the National Poetry Competition. His poems have been published in the New Yorker, Poetry Chicago, LRB, TLS and New Statesman. He has written for the Guardian and Financial Times. He teaches at Brunel University, London.

Reviews

[Lewis Isbell · Rating 2 out of 5]

that was definetly something. confident and confusing

[Erica Lewis · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to love this. And some of it was indeed brilliant, but some was, in the words whispered by the Director to the Camera Operator:

But, but, but. What the what!!!

I definitely liked some of it a lot though. The description of Babu as form-filling clerical syntax! And it's chock-full of references from Disney to Dionysus, Dai Bread to Dickinson, London, Leicester, Brum. Kali, Sappho, Hughes. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Thomas. And loads that I obviously didn't get. Including the references to various poetic meters.

I spent the last half of the book perpetually confused. And I'm still not sure how to tell the difference between high, medium, and low babu.

I did like the lampooning of fusion food like jazz in rap. It's still rap. Bumbaclaat.

Medium smiles, medium relish.