Letters to America
eBook - ePub

Letters to America

  1. 88 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Letters to America

About this book

The Poetry Book Society Winter 2020 Choice

In Letters to America the 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.

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Yes, you can access Letters to America by Fred D'Aguiar in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & American Poetry. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Table of contents

  1. Title Page
  2. Acknowledgements
  3. Contents
  4. Dedication
  5. Atlantic Ground
  6. Downtown L.A.
  7. The Border
  8. Derek Walcott
  9. Axe
  10. I Dreamed JB Says to Me
  11. 1960
  12. What I Left Out
  13. Sun Rises in Mid-City, L.A.
  14. Treatment for a Romance
  15. Black Lives Matter
  16. Bullet
  17. Body Count
  18. Claudia Jones
  19. Marx In The Jungle
  20. Kamau
  21. Agrarian Dreams
  22. King David Cooks Ital in Port Antonio
  23. Call & Response
  24. Burning Paradise
  25. Letters to America (An Abecedary)
  26. Calypso
  27. About the Author
  28. By the Same Author
  29. Copyright