Daljit Nagra’s Poetics of Tactile Sabotage

Writing becomes grooming: repetitive, humble, necessary. Richard Steinhardt. Photograph by Lisa Steinhardt

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The most radical claim in Daljit Nagra’s Yiewsley is that he writes with an ‘unskilled mind’.

All that mannered rhyme and rhythm felt too tuxedo

so you placed each selected on the anvil

of an unskilled mind which foregrounded semantics

to make you fit for the pennon of class war.

                                                            (p. 77, Versed)

Nagra, Daljit. Yiewsley. Faber & Faber, June 2026. Hardback: £14.99; ebook. Faber Poetry Subscription title for June 2026 (subscribe by 31 May to receive). “A return to the poet’s boyhood and the town that made him.”

by Yogesh Patel

This revitalised thesis, allows Nagra to offer his new collection of poems from his old mould of syntax, but away from the critics who have imprisoned him in their cliché; namely, Punglish. He places language on the anvil to forge lines to become alloys of culture and class war, leaving racism as a witness. This is not the sabotage of craft, but a renewal of it, in his own avenue that remained his hallmark over the years. One may feel the tautology in the meanings of the ‘mannered rhyme and rhythm‘ and the ‘tuxedo’ and prefer to drop the longer phrase, but he uses it to differentiate the discipline in ‘manner’ and the style in ‘tuxedo’, perhaps to lead us to the sense of foreign tradition, not because he feels squeezed in it, but because it feel ‘too tuxedo’, too dressed, too performed, too English (foreign) in the wrong way. Instead, he develops a poetics of tactile abrasion: the pen scrapes, the syntax jumbles, the ‘knuckle‑splash of snapped ginger‘ replaces the docile blend of English culinary taste of the poetic patois.

Where many poets of the Indian diaspora polished English until it shone, Nagra, until recently Chair of the Royal Society of Literature and honoured with an MBE, roughens it. He writes with a Bic biro not because he cannot afford a fountain pen, but because the Bic is the ‘comeback tool of the underclass’, a weapon against snobs, a functional commodity. But in the lines below, Bic is a razor, a social participant. So we are in a bathroom with a seven‑year‑old boy shaving his grandfather’s back before a wrestling match — a perfect collage for the class architecture announced in the ‘unskilled mind’ thesis.

‘best of all, each month you’d follow his hobble
to the bathroom and while he’d lean against the basin
he’d tell you to dab water on the wings
and the lower back

then tell you to Bic it all
so you’d grip the orange handle of the razor
equipped to be useful, trusted, honoured’

                                                (p. 38‑39, ‘Bic’)

Here is the connection to the ‘unskilled mind’mentioned above. The boy is not learning a refined art. He is learning a trade: how to hold a razor, how to apply pressure, how to be ‘useful, trusted, honoured’ in the smallest domestic register. The ‘scraping music’ is ‘subtle as the cooker gas / turned low’, not a symphony, but a kitchen sound. This is the ‘anvil’ Nagra spoke of: a blacksmith’s tool, not a poet’s desk. When the grandfather departs for India ‘to prepare for his pyre’, the boy cannot follow. So he retains him ‘in hand with a Bic biro‘. The hand that held the razor now holds the pen. The same cheap disposable tool. The same unskilled grip. The same class.

This is not sentiment. It is class war fought with small weapons. The ‘tuxedo’ poets write with fountain pens that glide. Nagra writes with a Bic that scrapes. The page becomes the grandfather’s back. Writing becomes grooming: repetitive, humble, necessary.

Two nations switching in you, an English teacher
who’d open each evening to the verse of his Indian
interiors
that felt alive as the knuckle-splash of snapped ginger.

                                                (p. 79, ‘Versed’)

This is the engine of Yiewsley. Not integration. Not hybridity as smooth blend. But switching; a rapid, tactile, sometimes violent oscillation between English and Indian, teacher and interior, page and body. In another poem, the ‘knuckle-splash of snapped ginger’ is not a metaphor for vigour. It is a description of the switch itself. Ginger is Punjab; the root, the spice, the grandmother’s kitchen. Snapped is the act of rupture, of crossing. Splash is the residue; the mark left on the page. The English teacher opens the verse; the Indian interiors splash back. That is the ‘class war’ Nagra announced in his ‘unskilled mind’ thesis: not a war between races, but between two nations inside one poet.

Now, to anchor the core premise of Nagra’s collection by looking further at the Bic, let us reexamine its significance. The boy in the bathroom, shaving his grandfather’s back, is learning the same switching. The razor scrapes skin (Indian: the grandfather, the wrestler, the village). The hand learns pressure (English: the tool, the disposable commodity, the bathroom in Yiewsley). Often in poems hidden nuances play tricks. I wonder if Bic’s disposable quality has anything to do with the working-class disposable with Indian immigrant workers! There is also another image here we are made to face by the poet. When the grandfather departs for his pyre, the boy replaces the razor with a biro; same brand, same hand, same switching. Is he disposing the interaction with skin for his writing? The page becomes the back. Writing becomes the ‘scraping music’ of a boy who has learned to be ‘useful, trusted, honoured’ in two nations at once. The ‘knuckle-splash of snapped ginger’ is the Bic biro crossing the page: ginger (Punjab) snapped (the rupture of migration) into splash (the poem).

This is what Nagra means by the ‘unskilled mind’. The skilled mind writes a sonnet that stays in one register, one nation, one tuxedo. The unskilled mind switches. It splashes. It allows him to write his book later in life about Tippoo Sultan’s Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy-Machine!!! That defiant, long, playful title with three exclamation marks created an upset at the time in the ‘tuxedo’ regime literati. It leaves the knuckle-mark of a hand that has shaved a grandfather and coded a computer and written a poem — all with the same unpolished, unashamed, bifold grip.

It is a triumphant testament to the power of writing from the hyphan, where the rupture of migration is forged into unforgettable poetry.

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Shortlisted for the Aryamati Prize 2023, Yogesh Patel received an MBE for literature in the Late Queen’s 2020 Honours List.

Patel edits Skylark and runs Skylark Publications UK, as well as a non-profit Word Masala project to promote literature. Honoured with the Freedom of the City of London, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize, he has LP records, films, radio, a children’s book, fiction, and non-fiction books, and three poetry collections to his credit. A recipient of many awards, including The International Pinnacle Accolade Award by Vatayan – Poetry on South Bank and a Co-Op Prize for the poetry on the environment, Patel was Poet-of-Honor at New York University in April 2019. Among the venues he has read in, are the House of Lords and the National Poetry Library. Patel’s poem is also scheduled for the moon aboard a NASA/SpaceX rocket to be archived in a time capsule as part of humanity’s cultural record on the moon’s Southern Hemisphere. His collection, The Rapids, was published by The London Magazine in 2021, and the latest, 2½: Two and a Half, is published by Poetrywala.

His writing has appeared in many notable literary journals, including PN Review, The London Magazine, World Literature Today, Indian Literature, Stand, Envoi, Under the Radar, Shearsman, IOTA, Understanding, Orbis, The Book Review, and Confluence. He has also appeared on BBC TV and Radio. Patel’s work also features in The National Curriculum Anthology, MacMillan educational series, Sahitya Akademi anthologies, and more than fifteen other anthologies across the world. Having written columns and articles for numerous broadsheets and literary journals, Yogesh was an editor at Ars Notoria Magazine (the Art of the Noteworthy) which he helped establish and writes regular columns for Confluence.