In You have no normal country to return to, Tom Sastry
explores questions of national identity and ‘the end of history'. A blistering,
bleakly funny and timely second poetry collection, following his
Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize shortlisted, A Man's House
Catches Fire.
By turns crisply satirical and questioning, You have
no normal country to return to ranges across the legacies of Empire,
postwar migration and the current crisis in English identity. Sastry’s precise,
brilliantly attuned poetry asks how the times we live in and the tales we tell
about them affect us; how our emotional landscapes are shaped by national myths
and the more personal stories we tell about ourselves. It is a book about
illusion, and discovering, again and again, that what was once taken for
granted was never really there; a guidebook for an age of “enchantments
collapsing on themselves”.