The son of Punjabis who came to Britain in the 1960s won one of Britain's leading poetry prizes yesterday with a poem about their experience, and all the generations of immigrants and asylum seekers who came after them.
Daljit Nagra's Look We Have Coming to Dover! evokes the lash of the breeze as immigrants reach port, and the "yobbish rain and wind" which is their first taste of English weather.
It was chosen as this year's best single entry in the Forward poetry prizes. Nagra, born and brought up in west London and a widely published poet, wins £1,000.
The chief judge, the poet Lavinia Greenlaw, said: "Look We Have Coming to Dover! is a poem of contemporary resonance which engages playfully and powerfully with our literary heritage."
The title reflects - without mockery - the fractured English of his parents' generation. But the verse is a virtuoso exercise in the command of English, with its slang, extreme compression, thrusting verbs and confident references to one of the great poems of the language, Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach, written in 1867.
Nagra writes:
Seasons or years we reap
inland, unclocked by the national eye
or a stab in the back, teemed for breathing
sweeps of grass through the whistling asthma
of parks, burdened, hushed, poling sparks across pylon and pylon.
Swarms of us, grafting
in the black within shot of the moon's spotlight,
banking on the miracle of sun to span
its rainbow, passport us to life.
Only after these years of adaptation, he suggests, can immigrants begin to see the world as Arnold fleetingly did, as "a land of dreams, / So various, so beautiful, so new".
Nagra beat a shortlist of four: David Constantine, Vona Groarke, Mario Susko and David Minhinnick.
The top prize, for best poetry collection, went to Kathleen Jamie for The Tree House, a collection haunted by a line from the German poet Friedrich Holderlin: "The world is ending its lyric phase." Jamie writes, "I think of this line whenever I hear of a new destruction or threatened extinction.
The judges said it "enlarges ... the scope and capacity of poetry being written today".
The £5,000 Felix Dennis prize for best first collection of poetry went to Leontia Flynn for These Days.
