Daljit Nagra is one of the UK's most acclaimed poets. His first collection from Faber & Faber, Look! We Have Coming to Dover is celebrated for its insider's perspective on the lives of Punjabi immigrant families, but its warmth and humour goes far beyond a merely ethnic viewpoint

 

"I love poetry that uses words in unusual ways and that foregrounds diction, for that is the very material of poetry. It's vital for language to be worked by the poet because a poem is a strained activity, because a poem is full of lines that do not go to the end of the page, because a poem is all about little words being left out, because, because... My heroes are all poets: Emily Dickinson, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, John Milton, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop...My heroes change regularly, so for example, my favourite poet of the past few days is Randall Jarrell whose Collected Poems I have just read. I may or may not go back to his poems. If I don't go back to him he may have become a villain to me, and if he becomes a villain I hope he becomes an honourable villain rather than a perfidious villain! Conversely he may become a super-hero if I keep going back to his poems but then I am digressing as I was merely asked to state my heroes.

 

On National Poetry Day I will be delivering two sets of Readings for Brenda Read-Brown in Brimingham and West Bromwich. I shall read some poems on the train journey there and back. I know this because I have a predictable fidelity towards poetry. However, I do not know what I will be reading and this is my spontaneous fidelity towards poetry. If I read poetry for the whole journey I will simply try and soak up moods of tone, language etc rather than read each poem really closely although I may get all microscopic with certain poems to break up the reading rhythm - the way I read poetry has evolved over the years and I could talk about this at length but perhaps I should keep this highly-evolved reading feeling private."