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.
About the author
Fred D'Aguiar was born in London in 1960 to Guyanese parents and grew up in Guyana, returning to England when he was a teenager. He trained as a psychiatric nurse before reading African and Caribbean Studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury. His previous collections of poetry are "Mama Dot" (1985), "Airy Hall" (1989; winner of the Guyana Poetry Prize), 'British Subjects" (1993) and "Bill of Rights' (1998; shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize), all published by Chatto. His "An English Sampler: New and Selected Poems" appeared in 2001. Fred D'Aguiar is also the author of four novels, the first of which, "The Longest Memory" (Pantheon, 1994), won both the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award. His plays include "High Life" (1987) and "A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death" (1991), which was performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London.
Fred D'Aguiar was Judith E. Wilson Fellow at Cambridge University from 1989-1990 and has taught in the United States since 1992, where he has been Visiting Writer at Amherst College, Massachusetts (1992-1994), Assistant Professor of English at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine (1994-1995), and Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Miami. He is currently Professor of English and Gloria D. Smith Professor of Africana Studies at Virginia Tech State University.
Fred D'Aguiar was Judith E. Wilson Fellow at Cambridge University from 1989-1990 and has taught in the United States since 1992, where he has been Visiting Writer at Amherst College, Massachusetts (1992-1994), Assistant Professor of English at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine (1994-1995), and Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Miami. He is currently Professor of English and Gloria D. Smith Professor of Africana Studies at Virginia Tech State University.