In Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon writes of how colonialism impacts on the psyche of both the colonised and the colonisers. David McKirdy's poems reveal how colonial settlers, growing up in privilege in a far-flung Asian outpost, could have their perspectives altered as their alienation with their homeland grew.

Echoing the sentiments that many Indian and Afro-Caribbeans voiced after their return to their home country in the post-war years, McKirdy - born in Scotland, but raised in Hong Kong - opens this collection with Abroad in England. The poem explores his journey to 'find my centre and see my place of birth ... to confirm some utopian vision and the lies propagated in school/masked by total alienation from this totally alien nation'.

The bulk of Accidental Occidental might touch on the personal rather than the political - the yearning for departed friends, McKirdy's obsession with motorcycles - but what stands out is the poet's critical assessment of the colonial legacy in Hong Kong.

McKirdy continues in the vein of Albert Camus - a pied-noir, an Algerian-born Frenchman - in The First Man: that language without history furthers one's sense of alienation.

Puncturing colonial myths - such as his distaste for Blakean visions of Britain as a 'green and pleasant land', or the classic British chatter about the weather (which he mocks as 'conversational hors d'oeuvres') - McKirdy also lambasts the supposedly civilised west for persistent imperialism. In A Game of Marbles, he pointedly refers to Britain's hesitancy in returning relics to their rightful owners by chiding, 'Stolen, but proffered free for all/as a condition of foreign aid/to third class, third world citizens/needing daily bread, working like Trojans'.

Flagging asks diehard colonists - 'Some still fly the flag in good old Hong Kong/some still think it's 1945/and the sun never sets and we won the war/and civilised the natives before tea' - to shake off their dated mindsets: 'So bravely retreat, you're not needed now/leave the lights on there are people still here'.

Accidental Occidental oozes empathy with the oppressed majority not only in Hong Kong but also in the world. Bright Future depicts hypocrisy in US administrations by contrasting the way the Cuban boy Elian Gonzales - restrained from returning to his father in Cuba by anti-Castro exiles and 'induced to stay with bribes of apple pie/Coke and Disneyland' - with the moral panic perpetrated by another schoolboy shooting tragedy in deprived US communities.

Still, what sets McKirdy's collection apart is his ability to stay away from the rose-tinted visions that are easily available to a social group being elevated into positions of power and prestige for decades. Accidental Occidental could be a more critical riposte to Gweilo, Martin Booth's memoir of a childhood in Hong Kong filled with tales of 'going native' in exotic enclaves, but devoid of critical introspection about colonialism itself.

If Booth's book is testament to a nostalgia for the good old days, Accidental Occidental offers another perspective: that of a settler who considers himself an expatriate not in Hong Kong, but back in Britain.