The promised land - Andr Naffis-Sahely

While half the world swept west,
we trickled eastward, one by one,
single-file, like fugitives. Next stop:
Abu Dhabi, where my father had a job,

and money, for the first time in years . . .

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Flitting
from the mud-soaked floors of Venice to the glittering, towering
constructions of the Abu Dhabi of his childhood and early adulthood,
from present-day London to North America, Andr Naffis-Sahely's
bracingly plain-spoken first collection gathers portraits of promised
lands and those who go in search of them: labourers, travellers,
dreamers; the hopeful and the dispossessed.

'Naffis-Sahely's poems usher the reader in to a world of reversals and risk . . . His narratives hold memory to account'
DAVID HARSENT