Fred D'aguiar

Like no poetry you've ever known before, Fred D'Aguiar's novel-in-verse sweeps you up in the scintillating story of a young female slave who falls in love with the son of the plantation owner and runs away with him in search of a new life. En route they are rescued by an old man who has organised a secret underground railroad to help slaves escape, but they become separated from each other: Faith, the woman, is sold back into slavery and Christy, her lover, punished with forced labour. The novel is narrated by their son who is stuck in time until their story is told. Using the intricate rhyme-scheme of Byron's wonderfully picaresque Don Juan, D'Aguiar wittily plays with language to create poetry that is dazzling in its inventiveness whilst being utterly readable. Despite the seriousness of its subject matter, Bloodlines is full of humour, satire, experiment and, above all, life. Its characters are, like the language, brim-full of energy and very sympathetic as they struggle against vicissitude. Read this book fast like a novel, savour every word like a poem, do both, the choice is yours.

Bloodlines

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.

Bethany Bettany

Every once in a while, a new poet appears who makes us feel that the contours of contemporary poetry have been significantly changed. Fred D'aguiar is such a poet. Although still in his early twenties, he already has a wholly independent voice, and a powerful grasp of original and strange subjects. Many of these arise from his childhood in Guyana: the first section of Mama Dot comprises a series in which these early years are recalled with a passionately lyrical evocation of landscapes, incidents and family relations. They are sensuous celebrations, but are nevertheless touched with melancholy and nostalgia – qualities which are more fully evident elsewhere in the book, in poems which address the life D’Aguiar now leads in England, and which concentrate on themes of exile. In the final section, ‘Guyanese Days’, he returns once again to the scenes and memories of his childhood. Mama Dot is one of the most exciting first collections to have been published for many years: exhilarating, haunting and restlessly inventive.

Mama Dot

Written in taut, poetic language, THE LONGEST MEMORY is set on a Virginian plantation in the 19th century, and tells 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 join her in the free North. For his attempt to flee, he is whipped to death in front of his family, and this brutal event is the pivot around which the story evolves.

The Longest Memory

Airy Hall – a collection of linked short stories and a new long poem – will confirm and enhance D'aguiar’s reputation: its bold mingling of public and private themes, its skilful counterpointing of Britain and Guyana, and its combination of graceful evocation with tough argument, engage to produce poems which are tightly-worked, generously inclusive and powerfully arresting.

Fred D'aguiar

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