The Promised Land

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 . . .

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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