The Promised Land

Arresting reports of hardship, hope, 21st-century exile and the open road from a debut poet who has known them all.

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