look, Ma! am I fun enough yet?

Two book award shortlists have been announced this week; and while I don't always have much to say about award shortlists, I find it disappointing that the Guardian First Book Award list once again features no poetry, but three novels, a biography, and a "work of non-fiction" (sic).

It's doubly disappointing because Daljit Nagra's book, Look We Have Coming to Dover! did make it to the ten-book longlist. Of all the first poetry collections I've read that is one I could imagine having a bit of populist appeal; & the shtick, I mean the whole point, of this award is that reader's groups get to participate in the decision-making. The book is character-driven, for a start: the reading public never has to think of Browning as they read Nagra's pop-culture-infused dramatic monologues, and the comedy in the poems springs as much from the characters' "stories," and their particular misreadings of that culture, as from its lingustic expression. (I imagine "its linguistic expression" is not a phrase the readers' groups would really go for.)

I'm interested to see that in the Guardian's piece on the longlist, the cover image for Daljit's book is completely different from the real - or at least original - cover.

In real life he got one of Faber's beautiful typographical covers. It may be just me, but I find these covers very exciting, even now: the 2001 redesign (from Pentagram) still seems very fresh, and I confess I have bought new collections just because I was in love with their acid green or burnt sienna. The use of type (the font is Eric Gill's lovely Perpetua) still knocks me out - for me at least the twin charms of typography and colour are more than enough to sell a book - but oh, I don't know, I guess there's such a lack of confidence...* anyway, there's an excellent paragraph on theredesign here. Daljit's got gorgeous, lush colours: raspberry ground, title in orange and his name in violet - Asian colours, if you like, similar but different to the purple/acid orange/hot pink of Berryman's sixties-written 77 Dream Songs - but that's another post!

But on the longlist, he's represented with a pictorial cover in a "Buddha of Suburbia" vein, all brash, clashing and cluttered with the signifiers of seventies populism and immigrant living. It is fun; it certainly does fit the book; and it's quite possible to see how different people might be tempted to buy the book if it had been marketed that way in the first place.

Have I missed something? Is it being produced now with this cover on it? Judging from the Faber website it certainly appears so. Like the Harry Potter grown-up editions, God help us.

Unfortunately, I guess that being poetry just places the book beyond the pale, as far as a "mainstream" book shortlist goes. And I say this not because I think people don't want poetry. I think lots of people do, they tell me they do when they hear I'm a poet. I've lost count of the friends of friends and family who've told me they love poetry, but don't know what to read. No, I say it because I'm still trying to figure out why publishers and book chains don't seem to want poetry to do well.**


* For a couple of years when I was a teenager - and possibly before that, who knows, I can't remember now - there was a feature of Baroque existence in which, when I talked, in my mind's eye I saw the words floating across the screen of my brain, white against a black ground. Kind of like those old song lyrics on TV, with the ball bouncing across them, only without the ball. I just sort of assumed that most people saw this, and it didn't trouble me, unrtil one day I happened to mention it to my mother, and she thought it was so weird that I was afterwards conscious of it when it happened, and gradually it stopped. Or maybe it didn't, completely: I had a similar experience yesterday.

** Admittedly, repackaging Daljit's book a la Bend it Like Beckham does look like wanting to sell it - and who knows? Maybe it will work. But in that it also raises the question of what the Pentagram covers are supposed to do. Wouldn't Simon Armitage's books, for example, lend themselves to the pop, sweetshop approach? Couldn't Seamus Heaney be given Irish Heritage covers, to catch the Angela's Ashes readership?

Or else I wonder what role Daljit's race has to play in this. He himself has used the word "blackface," in both a poem and an interview, and of course his Punjabi-ness is part of the charm and interest of these poems. (He did have others, too, though, at one time.) The book has been marketed heavily - far more heavily than another first collection I can think of - on this angle, even to the extent that reviewers and intrerviewers have missed the other references and influences in his work. I hope he won't come to be seen as something "different" from the rest of the Faber poetry list.