Letters to America E-Book

Fred D'Aguiar

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

The Poetry Book Society Winter 2020 ChoiceIn Letters to Americathe 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.

Leseprobe

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Letters to America

FRED D’AGUIAR

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Ambit (Bullet; Kamau; Burning Paradise); BBC R4, Front Row (Kamau); Poetry London (Axe; Sun Rises in Mid-city LA); Poetry Review (Claudia Jones; I Dream JB Says To Me); Poetry (Letters to America); Prairie Schooner (King David Cooks Ital in Port Antonio); Race Today Anthology (Body Count); TLS (Derek Walcott; Downtown, LA); Living Stream Anthology (Call & Response); The Hedge #3 (Black Lives Matter); Terminus (What I left Out); Wasafiri (Calypso). My thanks to Debbie Dalton, Michael Schmidt, Andrew Latimer and Charlotte Rowland.

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CONTENTS

Title PageAcknowledgementsDedication Atlantic GroundDowntown L.A.The BorderDerek WalcottAxeI Dreamed JB Says to Me1960What I Left OutSun Rises in Mid-City, L.A.Treatment for a RomanceBlack Lives MatterBulletBody CountClaudia JonesMarx In The JungleKamauAgrarian DreamsKing David Cooks Ital in Port AntonioCall & ResponseBurning ParadiseLetters to America (An Abecedary)Calypso About the AuthorBy the Same AuthorCopyright 2

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To Dylan, Aniyah and baba Cruz

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5

ATLANTIC GROUND

Where bones build pace under

Water over grown with currents

Where pickaxes solder sparks

Plunged into such cranial soil

Where sounds collide to become

Muffled blankets by those bones

So that I may scrape them clean

Of their funeral salt holdings

So that all those bones assemble

Pulled together by coral music anchors

To walk once more water bridged so

Dance this blue fabric painted there

By a mind that moves eyes hands

Back forth by and by sea made land

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DOWNTOWN L.A.

Dark finds me waiting for a world

Birds bring to my patch of green,

Wings sow light, songs keep time.

My eyes sieve this dark till I make out

Stations in thick night, so many lookouts

Now clarify to settle into their names:

Trees, homes, powerlines, crisscross fences,

All meshed with sky, curved all around me.

Now the first engines unroll linoleum traffic,

My refrigerator shudders at the prospect

Of overtime, two lights over my stove frown

As I count down the years ready for daybreak.

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THE BORDER

Everybody took from a circle

What only arms could carry,

Yet this circle never depleted

As you would expect if people

Dipped into a bucket or a vault.

Instead it grew more pronounced

Seemed more circular if such a thing

Exists for a shape already manifest

Readymade for this world, all ready,

A whole world before those people

Gathered, their faces shining with

Conviction, for they know what they

Bring to the circle and what they take

From it, that no matter the exchange

That circle grows by giving them more.

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DEREK WALCOTT

The walk to the corner shop

From the tenement yard

Armed with a shopping list –

Groceries on trust until

Payday wipes the balance

Sheet clean for another week.

Days sharing midday shade

With the watchdog asleep

On dirt, bed of this earth,

Paws sprinting in a dream,

As you watch the day cool

Down for you to join friends

For a game of Catcher or Hop

Scotch – the one where you kick

A dry mango seed along squares

Drawn in the dirt as you hop

On one foot – while you wait

Your turn, watching, this happens.

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