Look We Have Coming to Dover! is the 2007 debut collection by British-Punjabi Sikh poet Daljit Nagra. The collection's title is an allusion to three influential works: W. H. Auden's Look, Stranger!, D. H. Lawrence's Look! We Have Come Through! and Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach". The titular poem won the 2004 Forward Poetry Prize for best single poem; the collection itself also won a Forward Poetry Prize for best first collection and won/was nominated for several other awards.
Many of the poems in the collection draw on Nagra's Punjabi-British background and his experience of multiculturalism in Britain. Nagra's parents came to England from the Punjab in the 1950s, and Nagra was born in London a decade later. The family moved to Sheffield in 1982.
Look We Have Coming to Dover! features many Indian--particularly Punjabi Sikh--characters. In an interview with Jon Stone, Nagra said that he is "interested in exploring the attitudes that [his] 'community' adopts - their beliefs, their practices, what they make of the beliefs and practices of those from another caste, gender, nation etc. My characters come from different generations and they have a variety of things to say about each other. . . As you can guess, the book is heavily populated with Indians."
At times, Nagra writes in "Punglish", a hybrid of English and the Punjabi language; however, on the use of the term "Punglish", Nagra said in a BBC interview that he "[is] not sure about that word, to be truthful. It sounds a bit ugly to [him], neither one thing nor the other. Mind you, [his] poetry itself is working with two cultures at the same time and trying to reflect that; trying to marry two different cultures and two different languages."
Nagra writes his poetry mostly while on the go ("while on the underground along the stretch of Metroland from King's Cross to Uxbridge, in the bedroom at night or while in a cafe") and/or while listening to rock music. Among his literary influences are Ruth Padel, Pascale Petit, Stephen Knight, etc.
