Fred D'Aguiar

Celebrating the centenary of the birth of the trailblazing African American author, Encounters with James Baldwin is a wide-ranging volume of short essays, reflections, interviews and poetry. This moving collection demonstrates the significant legacy of the writer and activist who spoke truth to power during the era of the fight for Black civil liberties in the US, and after.In this literary anthology, over 30 contributors reveal the influence of Baldwin's thought, speech and writing to their personal journeys and their awareness of the need for social justice.Authors included: Victor Adebowale; Toyin Agbetu; Rosanna Amaka; Michelle Yaa Asantewa; Lindsay Barrett; Eugen Bacon; Gabriella Beckles-Ray; Alan Bell; Selina Brown; Michael Campbell; Fred D’Aguiar; Thomas Glave; Sonia Grant; Zita Holbourne; Rashida Ismaili-AbuBakr; Paterson Joseph; Peter Kalu; Roy McFarlane; Ronnie McGrath; Michael McMillan; Tony Medina; Bill V Mullen; Nducu wa Ngugi; Lola Oh; Ewuare X. Osayande; Nii Ayikwei Parkes; Anton Phillips; Ray Shell; SuAndi; Tade Thompson; Patrick Vernon; Tony Warner.

For the Unnamed was originally entitled 'For the Unnamed Black Jockey Who Rode the Winning Steed in the Race Between Pico's Sarco and Sepulveda's Black Swan in Los Angeles, in 1852'. That title provided the full narrative in a nutshell: we know the names of the owners of the two horses, we know the horses' names, the place and date of the race. But apart from his colour, and his victory, we know nothing about the jockey who made the whole thing happen. Fred D'Aguiar's new book recovers and re-imagines his story. It was the most publicised race of its era with numerous press notices but he remained unnamed. We are given several perspectives on the action - owner's, trainer's, the horse Black Swan's, the jockey's lover, the jockey himself. But one crucial element of identity is forgotten, and that forgetfulness speaks eloquently about the time and the freed man's circumstances in the mid-nineteenth century. Fred D'Aguiar's previous collection, Letters to America (2020), was a Poetry Book Society Winter Choice and a White Review Book of the Year.

There has always been an intense physicality to D’Aguiar’s work, matched by a penchant for geographic groundedness and a biographical perspicacity, that has made him one of the finest writers of his generation. What is most striking about this chapbook is how much keeps him dreaming, even in places and situations where many imaginations would stumble and falter in the face of the relentless violence to which we have all become far too inured. There is hardly a Black British writer working today who doesn’t owe D’Aguiar a considerable debt, whether they know it or not.

In this piercing and unforgettable memoir, the award-winning poet reflects on a year of turbulence, fear, and hope.

The Poetry Book Society Winter 2020 Choice. The fourth Carcanet collection from Guyanese-British poet Fred D'Aguiar.

The memories from which Fred D’Aguiar translates these poems are cultural and personal, from the anciencies of the Gilgamesh epic to the modern world, from classical philosophy to C.L.R. James and Aimé Césaire, from Asia and Europe to the new world in which their destinies are unpredictably worked out. D’Aguiar’s concluding translations are of Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite, masters and remakers of language and form, from whom (among a multitude of others) he takes his bearings. This unusual integration of tributes and the ironies they provoke give Translations a radical colouring: D’Aguiar is learned; he is also wry, alert to the false notes in history and what follows from them. `The world map / Turned from red to brown to black / And blue, drained of empire.’ And he is passionate, responding always to the deep feelings of others, from desire to love, elegy to celebration.

A Caribbean country on the verge of collapse. A small town called Boundary. A rambling house inhabited by three generations of the Abrahams family. And a little girl who is trying to make sense of it all.Bethany Bettany is five years old when her father dies and her mother leaves her to fend for herself in the Abrahams household. The place simmers with resentment: her uncles and aunts think her mother killed her father; her grandmother refuses to leave her room. Bethany is the scapegoat for it all. In Bethany, D'Aguiar has created both a loveable character and a symbol for the search of a nation to make itself whole. If Boundary is Guyana, then Bethany Bettany - a girl torn between two names - is the spirit of its people poised for flight.

Acclaimed novelist, playwright, and poet Fred D'Aguiar has been short-listed for the T.S. Eliot Prize in poetry for Bill of Rights, his narrative poem about the Jonestown massacre, and won the Whitbread First Novel Award for The Longest Memory. In this beautifully imagined work of literary fiction, he returns to the territory of Jim Jones's utopian commune, interweaving magical realism and shocking history into a resonant story of love, faith, oppression, and sacrifice in which a mother and daughter attempt to break free with the help of an extraordinary gorilla.Joyce and her young daughter, Trina, are members of a utopian community ruled by a magnetic preacher. When Trina, plays too near to the cage holding the commune's gorilla, Adam, the ape attacks and kills the child. Or so everyone believes. That night, the preacher dramatically "revives" her--an act that transforms Trina into a symbol of its charismatic leader's God-like power. Desperate to save her daughter from the preacher's control, the outspoken Joyce attempts a daring escape, a run for freedom aided by another prisoner--the remarkable Adam.Told with a sweeping perspective in lush prose, shimmering with magic, and devastating in its clarity, Children of Paradise is a brilliant and evocative exploration of oppression--of both mind and body--and of the liberating power of storytelling.

'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.

"Continental Shelf" traces a journey, across continents and from youth to maturity. It moves from memories of childhood in Guyana, through a long elegiac exploration of the shootings at Virginia Tech University in 2006, to the reflective closing section which gives its title to the book. Fred D'Aguiar celebrates individuals and the histories embedded in places. He conjures up a sensuous childhood world of characters, stories, a loved particularity - a smell of bitumen, the local hero who comes last in a National Cycle Championship, a distant train's incantation of 'greenheart, mora, baromalli' - impressions so distinct and powerful that 'fumes - spin my head/Back whenever I catch a whiff from a car'. In D'Aguiar's Elegies for the thirty-three people who died in Virginia, that loss of unique and particular individuals is mourned, in a scrutiny of what civil and private life has become, and how, alongside grief, we may recover delight in the world. In his first full-length collection since "Bill of Rights" (1998), D'Aguiar celebrates how imagination and memory enable us to cope with violence and death. Love, above all, is the mainstay.

The tragic story of a rebellious, fiercely intelligent young slave who breaks all the rules: in learning to read and write; in falling in love with a white girl, the daughter of his owner, and finally in trying to escape and joining her in the free North.