The Rose of Toulouse

''I should never ask / directions to my childhood'', writes Fred D''Aguiar: there is no way back home. The Rose of Toulouse is a book of geographies tracing the various places the poet has lived, their histories, and his own history as he travels away from who he was. His transformations and shifts - between Britain, Guyana and the USA - are his identity: ''Each year I travel, my passport photo / looks less like me.'' In both flexible free verse and more formally patterned poems, D''Aguiar conveys the fragility of flesh and the transience of memories. See more