Tippoo Sultan's incredible white-man-eating tiger toy-machine!!! - Daljit Nagra

Look We Have Coming to Dover!, the remarkable debut by Daljit
Nagra, marked the arrival of a thrilling new voice in poetry and won the
Forward Prize for Best First Collection along the way. In this, his
second volume, his writing shows every bit the same verve and excitement
that made his first book an unmissable event. Tippoo Sultan's
Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy-Machine!!! takes its cue from
the eighteenth-century automaton (a tiger savaging a British soldier) in
a series of poems that begin at the throat of the old British Empire.
In these vivid, real and sometimes surreal pieces, Daljit Nagra creates
his own inimitable linguistic bhaji: where Shakespeare meets the
Subcontinent in a range of forms from English sonnets to spectacular
displays of 'bollyverse' or the tender love songs of the monsoon. The
poems take their bearings from cornershops and classrooms, the strange,
part-arcadian, part-hellish streets of 'Londonstan' and the places where
the north of England collides with the Punjab: from Larkin to the
ladoos in Raja t'Wonder Dog. Little escapes Nagra's tigerish gaze: race
relations, family feuds, cultural inheritance, religious bigotry, the
British honours system, Rudyard Kipling, the blurring of Kevin Keegan
with Kabbadi. Comic, hard-hitting, passionate, satirical, Daljit Nagra
has written a book that is as powerfully thought-provoking as it is
delightful.