The promised land : poems from itinerant life

While half the world swept west, we trickled eastward, one by one, single-file, like fugitives. Next stop: Abu Dhabi, where my father had a job, and money, for the first time in years . . . __________________________________________________ Flitting from the mud-soaked floors of Venice to the glittering, towering constructions of the Abu Dhabi of his childhood and early adulthood, from present-day London to North America, André Naffis-Sahely's bracingly plain-spoken first collection gathers portraits of promised lands and those who go in search of them: labourers, travellers, dreamers; the hopeful and the dispossessed. 'Naffis-Sahely's poems usher the reader in to a world of reversals and risk . . . His narratives hold memory to account' DAVID HARSENT Flitting from the mud-soaked floors of Venice to the glittering, towering constructions of the Abu Dhabi of his childhood and early adulthood, from the 'disposable cities' composed of shanty towns and rough encampments which spring up wherever new resources are discovered to present-day London and North America, Andre Naffis-Sahely's bracingly plain-spoken first collection gathers portraits of promised lands and those who go in search of them: travellers, labourers, dreamers; the hopeful and the dispossessed. This is poetry as reportage, as much an act of memory as of sinuous, clear-eyed vision. As this arresting new poet has remarked elsewhere: I don't like poems that invent memories; I have enough of my own