Look We Have Coming to Dover! is a collection of poetry Daljit Nagra which shares its title with one of the poems inside. There is evidence enough in the text to argue that this was not some random or arbitrary choice. Instead, it is more likely that “Look We have Coming to Dover!” was picked to become the representative verse of the entire collection because it is representative of the overarching theme which unites the rest of the poems with each other: the immigrant experience.
The poem “Look We have Coming to Dover!” actually begins with a quotation from Matthew Arnold’s very famous work of verse, “Dover Beach.” “So various, so beautiful, so new…” leads directly into Nagra’s opening stanza which describes a decidedly not-so-beautiful scene on the seas of Dover: stowaways making their way illegally into the country in order to invade it. Their means of conveyance to a new life is a boat speeding across high tide with “gobfuls of surf phegmed by cushy come-and-go / tourists prow’d on the cruisers.” This unpromising entry into a new country is not destined for smooth sailing either on land or sea as later in the poem the speakers observes of this life in a new land:
“Seasons or years we reap
inland, unclocked by the national eye
or stab in the back”
This dark portrait of dashed expectations and a hard life for immigrants perfectly sets a tone that will be maintained by mean of the other poems collected in the volume. What is notably engaged in the title poem is notable lacking the pun-as-title entry “Singh Song!” The speaker who describes the boat journey into Dover use English words and pronunciation throughout and even throws in some like “Vexin their blarnies” and “yobbish rain and wind.” This contrasts sharply with the dialect-laden introductory stanza of “Singh Song!”
“I run just one ov my daddy's shops
from 9 O'clock to 9 O'clock
and he vunt me not to hav a break
but ven nobody in, I do di lock”
While one must parse the meaning of the words in the title poem to understand it is a story about immigration told by an immigrant, in this case any doubt is immediately removed. And the dialect gets even thicker as the narrative moves forward. In fact, the second stanza will almost certainly give some readers fits, especially xenophobes. Though, of course, xenophobes are pretty unlikely to even open the book or look up the poem:
“cos up di stairs is my newly bride
vee share in chapatti
vee share in di chutney”
The rest of the poems in the collection join with these two representative examples to paint varied portrait of what it is like sharing national identities between a cultural homeland and an adopted homeland in which that cultural identity automatically situates you as an outsider looking in. “In a White Town” offers a snapshot glance at those women “never looked like the other boys’ mums.” Although the content of Nagra’s poems are specifically about the Indian-Anglo experience, they share a commonality of the outsider’s perspective on the central issue facing all cultural duality: to assimilate or not to assimilate and, if so, to what degree. This aspect endows his verse with a universality that makes the poems accessible and anyone experiencing that immigrant disconnect or, for that matter, any sort of hyphenate identity confusion.
