The Rose of Toulouse E-Book

Fred D'Aguiar

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

Seitenzahl: 53

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

'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 photolooks 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.

Leseprobe

FRED D’AGUIAR

The Rose of Toulouse

For Dylan

Acknowledgements

Some of these poems first appeared in the following publications: American Scholar, Best British Poetry 2011, Dublin Poetry Review (online at http://www.dublinpoetryreview.ie/), Edinburgh Review, Fulcrum 3, The Guardian, Island, Poetry London, Poetry Review, The Times Literary Supplement, Red, The Same, Small Axe Salon, The Wolf. Other poems were commissioned for and published in the anthologies A Room To Live In (ed. Tamar Yoseloff), New Writing 12, The Ropes (ed. Sophie Hannah and John Hegley), and Velocity (ed. Maja Priusnitz). Some of the poems have been broadcast on The Verb, BBC Radio 4. ‘Dalí on Dickens’ was a commission for A Mutual Friend: Poems for Charles Dickens edited by Peter Robinson, introduced by Adrian Poole (Two Rivers Press & The English Association). ‘Legal Tender’ was commissioned by Arts Council England for its celebration of the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery and webcast on the ACE website. ‘Emily Dickinson: How Does Your Garden Grow?’, which appears here in revised form, began life as a commission to commemorate BBC Radio 3’s re-broadcast in November 2010 of Aaron Copland’s arrangement of eight poems by Emily Dickinson, produced by Julian May. ‘The Giant of Land’s End’ was published in the Aark chapbook series edited by Sudeep Sen.

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Politics

Rigged

Key West

Excise

Boy Soldier

War on Terror

Wartime Aubade

Trace

Monday Morning

Shoes My Father Wore

The Lady with the Purple Glove

Underwater

Wednesday’s Child

Yesterday’s News

The Dream Giver

Letter from King Ferdinand of Spain to the Tainos in October 1493

Legal Tender

Dreamboat

Wish

News from Nowhere

English

Life

Dalí on Dickens

Calvino

In Memoriam

Love

19 Victoria Street, Shrewsbury

A Concrete Walk in the Woods

The Rose of Toulouse

Saturday, Ocean Creek

Calypso History Lesson

from American Vulture

The Vulture Goddess

Vulture Highway Code

Vulture Red Letter Day

Vulture’s Theory of Perpetual Return

Vulture in El Dorado

Emily Dickinson, How Does Your Garden Grow?

The Storm

The Fence

Night Swim

The Giant of Land’s End

About the Author

Also by Fred D’Aguiar from Carcanet Press

Copyright

Politics

Today’s sun looks nothing like yesterday’s

Great ball of fire – goodness, gracious – that plummeted

Behind Brush Mountain in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Today’s sun holds a steady white flame to stubborn fog

Grazing willy-nilly among trees, hills, valleys.

Rigged

Here comes a fisherman with a lead-fringed net

He gathers, swings and throws in a circle

At the sky above water and the circle falls,

Joins its pleated reflection,

BP spill folding back into itself in reverse,

All slick and no glitter in that fisherman’s catch.

Key West

Dawn begins in my skull,

flits from right to left,

back to front, searching

for an exit. I open my eyes.

Dawn builds a bedroom

instantly to house itself,

walls that absorb light,

a ceiling light drips from,

floors with creases

full of trapped dirt

only light squeezes

sideways through.

I cross to my bedroom window,

each muscle, every stretch

and contraction a point of light.

The points expand and join,

making this body of bright bones,

translucent flesh and blood

for battery-acid; this engine.

Single piston and cylinders.

I open those blinds.

Let light build a world

barely able to contain itself;

itself barely contained.

Excise

Each year I travel, my passport photo

looks less like me. Two of us

trick our way through customs.

My heart dances and I tell myself,

Don’t breathe so shallow,

when I face a uniform block

my path, unlike my laminated

photo tucked in my breast pocket,

locked in amber and oblivious.

I age for both of us at double speed.

My silent partner keeps his poker face,

I do the talking for the two of us.

Nights, I dream this face but not my life,

leaving me with a sour taste and smell,

longing for a country not on any map:

to be the man who crosses borders

without a passport; whose face matches

curved lines that spell my name.

The official behind Plexiglass

takes her time, looks me up and down.

I speak as she scans my passport

and watches for what the screen brings

up about me. I’ve no idea what she sees

that makes her ask about my line of work.

I answer with a face

that’s stranger to my passport every day,

telling lies about a life not lived, not his.

Boy Soldier

What a smile! One large lamp for a face,

smaller lanterns where skin stretches over

bones waiting for muscle, body all angles.

His Kalashnikov fires at each moving

thing before he knows what he drags

down. He halts movement of every

kind and fails to weigh whom he stops

dead or maims, his bullets

like jabs thrown before the thought

to throw them, involuntary shudders

when someone, somewhere, steps over

his shallow, unmarked, mass grave.

But his smile remains undimmed,

inviting, not knowing what hit him,

what snuffs out the wicks in his eyes.

Except that he moves and a face just like

his figures like him to stop all action

with a flick of finger on the trigger.

War on Terror

Lasts for as long as nightmares

paint behind the eyelids

long as a measure of cord

cut from a navel remains buried

under a tamarind tree

not long after the eyes wash away

last night’s paint

no longer than a piece of string

tied at a navel

Wartime Aubade

I hear them before I see them

Their song as though music might run out

Rapid twitters mingle with lazy burbles

Instruments warm up in pattern and rhythm

Light answers a summons from the east

Pushing aside this thick and heavy curtain

The day’s first truck crests Brush Mountain

Dragging a parachute of engine noise

Stop me before I run away with myself

To join an army of beaks and feathers

A light brigade pouring over the horizon

A dark enemy driven into the eaves

Trace

There’s no love lost

Between the time kept by hills

And the smell left by an animal

Just out of sight and

No worse loss than that love

9 am on this hill of hills

Spreads sunlight with a trowel

Shaped by overnight dew

Speckled with hoof, claw and foot

Prints and my thumb