Cada línea escrita por Defreds es una mano tendida.Un libro para abrazar y dejarse abrazar: Mientras duela es un refugio hecho con palabras, pequeñas, sencillas, como una casita en un árbol. Un espacio adonde subir para refugiarse, para soñar, para recuperarse. Un lugar al que acudir cuando la vida duele, cuando el miedo paraliza, cuando los recuerdos nos atan mas que el vuelo de las ilusiones de futuro.Con su estilo directo y cercano, tan nitidamente afectuoso, Defreds nos habla de perdidas, comienzos, silencios, rupturas, domingos, heridas, pero sobre todo de esperanza, ternura cotidiana y consuelo. Porque todos necesitamos ese balsamo para sentirnos comprendidos.
A spirited and stirring return to the poets boyhood and the town that made him This autobiographical collection candidly explores Daljit Nagras experiences growing up from the sixties to the eighties in the predominantly white working-class town of Yiewsley, close to Heathrow airport in Outer London. As Britain transitions from a post-war manufacturing economy to the Thatcher years and the computer age, we see a young boy navigating childhood friendships and mishaps. The poems bring to life a bustling house filled with relatives from India, who had arrived, legally or otherwise, in the UK: devout realists already, and always, knuckled into work. They also offer powerful insight into the makings of the writer: the messy English at home fusing with Bollywood ballads, Top of the Pops and hymns at school, to develop a voice entirely his own.[Nagras poems] do that rare thing in poetry of stretching language, making it do things it hasnt done before. Its multiculturalism at its most complex, individual and real.Scotland on SundayA book of guts and heart, an honest, often polemical collection that posits worn-on-the-sleeve, personal and public questions without implying simple answers.TLS, on British Museum