Singh songs

Look We Have Coming To Dover! won a Forward Prize in 2004, before it became the centrepiece of this collection. A play on Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach, it imagines the first sighting of land off the deck of a ship bringing Sikh Punjabi immigrants from India to the UK in the early 1960s. Nagra's parents were among them. Half a century later, their son is being credited by a national newspaper as the voice of the second generation, "capturing the experience of British-born Indians". "Heavy stuff," he says of that claim. "It implies a certain ego on my part. All I'm trying to do, I think, is be honest."

This makes it difficult to know if Nagra thinks of the immigrant experience as a story of success or failure. The opening poem, Darling & Me! mentions mythic Coronation Street sourpuss Hilda Ogden. "I didn't want to use too many clever classical allusions," he says. "She Ogden represents more about culture in this country than Aphrodite and Hercules." There are other poems coloured with the pinks and yellows of Punjabi food and clothing, which seem to congratulate an entire people for coming this far, and making it work. "Yes!" shouts Nagra, but gently. "So much in there is celebrating arrival. To move from one world to another, to cope, and to produce children who are coping too. There's something magnificent about it."

There is also a poem called Arranged Marriage, which describes a Sikh wedding day in terms of personal experience: "Zombying behind both me and the bride/ each fixed pose was frozen in line." The tension in Nagra's work is not purely a matter of poetic form. He has been balancing opposed forces all his life. And the only time he shows any of that strain this afternoon is when talking about his failed marriage, which was arranged after they met at university. "It was extremely official," he says. "My parents and hers were from the same caste. They checked each others' backgrounds right down to the villages. I wanted to get out of it before it happened, but then it was too late and I succumbed. There was always the hope that it will work, because it would have made life so much easier."

For that exact same reason, he had agreed to do a science degree, but abandoned it for reasons of his own. "It just wasn't me," he says, "like the marriage wasn't me. It wasn't my ex-wife either - we still get on, and I see my daughter regularly. The problem came down to a whole complex of our families and their traditions. Things aren't always hunky dory in the world I come from. Questions of your cultural rights can become very painful."

Nagra was born in west London and now lives in nearby Willesden, not far from the secondary school where he is currently teaching Shakespeare's Othello and the poems of Phillip Larkin to the sixth form. Few poets can afford to quit the day job, as Larkin the librarian knew.

He takes Tuesdays off to write and edit, although giving interviews here in his flat may be excused as work-related. Nagra told one of his classes about his debut book, and a pupil immediately posted a five-star review on Amazon without even reading it: "Puts Keats to shame ... bask in the teachings of The Nagrameister." Amusing as The Nagrameister finds this, he knows that the people he is writing about will never read these poems. Not even his own parents.

"There are so many different voices in the book," says Nagra, "but they are manifestations of me. I set conflict among them, and some of that conflict comes from my own awareness that not many Indians will read these poems. They're being given to a white, middle-class intelligensia. My relatives wouldn't read them, and couldn't follow them anyway. They don't know what poetry is, or how it works. They just want to know why I'm doing this, and who for. In a lot of the poems I ask myself the same thing."

His father came from the Punjab with that first migration. He didn't particularly need to. His family were wealthy - the Punjab is affluent because of its fertility - and he lived a comfortable life as a wrestler famous throughout the region. "Wrestling is a cushy thing out there," says Nagra, "because you can get someone else to work in the fields for you. I think he was tempted to come over here just because everyone else was going. He wanted to see for himself."

Nagra's mother followed soon after, and he and his brother were born into a chaotic household of relatives who worked at all hours. "My uncles lived with us," he says, "and my grandparents. Everyone under one roof, and everyone doing overtime at the concrete factory, the Sugar Puffs factory." Neither parent ever learned much English, and Nagra spoke only Punjabi until he went to school.

There is a glossary at the back of his new book, translating the lingo that Nagra throws around throughout. "Fut-a-fut" means "immediately". "Shrubby" means "pissed". "Rub" is the word for God, and "Wahay Guru" is a shorthand way of saluting the 10 spiritual founders of Sikhism. It's a fun touch, and instructive.

"TS Eliot did The Waste Land," says Nagra, "and poetry became something deadly serious. I wanted to put in something comical." He is still mildly surprised that his editors at Faber - which has remained the UK's grandest and most dedicated publisher of poetry since Eliot himself was an editor there - allowed him to "keep the language silly".

Asked how long it took him to appreciate English enough to take an interest in its poetry, he says he doesn't even remember being taught any.

"I went to thick school," he says. "We did CSEs because we weren't considered clever enough for O levels. Our literature component was three short stories by Roald Dahl. I wanted to read To Kill A Mockingbird, but they told me it would be too difficult." His ending up a poet, and a teacher, must have seemed some kind of double-protest. "Partly," says Nagra. "When I did start reading poetry, at the age of 20, it seemed such amazing, exciting stuff, that I wondered why I hadn't been deemed good enough for it. I do feel quite bitter about the education we received. Or didn't receive."

He is 40 now, old enough to remember when the UK was a right-wing institution, and the National Front were a physical threat. If fellow Punjabis consider Nagra "coconut" in his career choices - "brown on the outside," he explains, "white on the inside" - it may be something to do with his needing a protective shell. "There were four non-white kids at school, and me and my brother were two of them. You had to act whiter than white or get your head kicked in. So you try to be good at football, rugby, cricket, not give them any excuse. We were very successful at that."

Many of these memories surface in the lines of his poems. Parade's End describes his family's move to Sheffield when he was a teenager, having made enough money to open their own shop. The shutters would be dented overnight, and his father's gold-painted Granada was splashed with battery acid. The neutrality of the poem ("Then we swept away the bonnet leaves/from gold to the brown of our former colour") is a product of Nagra's own sincere ambivalence. He understands why their presence was resented, and thinks it had as much to do with their success as their colour.

"I was picked on in the north because I had a southern accent. We were making a profit. Thatcher was telling people to get on their bikes, and that suited us. But nobody else seemed to have work. The factories were closing. These depressed men would come in every day and buy 10 cigarettes, never 20." None of Nagra's poems, in fact, seem to blame anyone for anything. "Empathy," he says, "is the leap we have to make. Sometimes I think I write just to put myself in a better mood. I'll start out with a figure of satire like Mr Bulram the elder, elitist Sikh protagonist of one poem and find myself understanding their predicament."

His parents have long since sold their shop and now travel back and forth from India, which was always their dream. They had other dreams too - of their sons becoming doctors and lawyers, marrying Sikh girls of approved origin, and returning with them to the Punjab. Nagra's life and work so far has been testament to their failure. He can see their point of view. "These aren't liberal, educated people," he says. "They came from that other world, with its old concerns of honour and shame. In this world their system doesn't work, but I respect that first generation for trying. I sympathise because so many of them lost their children over it, and just withered away."

His own child from that arranged marriage is now 12, and evidence enough that good things can come of tension. He must think the same thing of his work. As Nagra writes in On The Birth Of A Daughter: "I loved you for your genetic slip/from our messy family business." It's sad to think that his own parents can't read it, and wouldn't if they could. "It's weird for me," he says. "But the poems seem to make me feel reconciled to all that."

Look We Have Coming To Dover! is published on Thursday by Faber, £8.99