21st Century
A01=Fred D'Aguiar
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American
Author_Fred D'Aguiar
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Product details
- ISBN 9781800170087
- Dimensions: 135 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 26 Nov 2020
- Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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The Poetry Book Society Winter 2020 Choice
A White Review Book of the Year 2020
In Letters to America the Guyanese-British poet, novelist and playwright Fred D'Aguiar has some difficult things to say. The twenty-two poems are full of lived tales and memories - of Britain, the Caribbean and the United States - and of specific and shared memory. He supplies some of the difficult detail he has omitted from earlier poems. The modern mid-city Los Angeles sun-rise we experience is a cacophony, violent and memorable music rendered in prose. The poems weave in and out of familiar forms, including terza rima, casting and breaking spells. There is peril at every turn, and opportunity.
D'Aguiar is now Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, a wry perspective from which to survey a nation enduring a dismal present, and also the years that shaped him. It is the variety of lives, his own among them, that provide the changing illumination of his writing, and he has developed a mimetic language that takes its bearings from Derek Walcott and from Kamau Brathwaite whose 'Barbados shines/Back at Africa'. Like his chosen forebears, he risks longer forms as well as lyrics, most notably in the fragmented 'Burning Paradise', in 'Call & Response', an impassioned exchange with Martin Luther King, and in the extended title poem.
This is Fred D'Aguiar's fourth Carcanet collection, and his most ambitious.
A White Review Book of the Year 2020
In Letters to America the Guyanese-British poet, novelist and playwright Fred D'Aguiar has some difficult things to say. The twenty-two poems are full of lived tales and memories - of Britain, the Caribbean and the United States - and of specific and shared memory. He supplies some of the difficult detail he has omitted from earlier poems. The modern mid-city Los Angeles sun-rise we experience is a cacophony, violent and memorable music rendered in prose. The poems weave in and out of familiar forms, including terza rima, casting and breaking spells. There is peril at every turn, and opportunity.
D'Aguiar is now Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, a wry perspective from which to survey a nation enduring a dismal present, and also the years that shaped him. It is the variety of lives, his own among them, that provide the changing illumination of his writing, and he has developed a mimetic language that takes its bearings from Derek Walcott and from Kamau Brathwaite whose 'Barbados shines/Back at Africa'. Like his chosen forebears, he risks longer forms as well as lyrics, most notably in the fragmented 'Burning Paradise', in 'Call & Response', an impassioned exchange with Martin Luther King, and in the extended title poem.
This is Fred D'Aguiar's fourth Carcanet collection, and his most ambitious.
Fred D'Aguiar was born in London of Guyanese parents, and grew up in Guyana before returning to London for his secondary and tertiary education. He has lived in the US since the mid-90s and currently he is Professor of English at UCLA. He trained as a psychiatric nurse before reading African and Caribbean Studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury. He was Judith E. Wilson Fellow at Cambridge University and has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. For the Unnamed (2023) is Fred D'Aguiar's fifth collection with Carcanet. His previous poetry book, Letters to America was a Poetry Book Society Winter Choice in 2020. Carcanet also published his nonfiction, Year of Plagues (2021).
