Fred D'Aguiar

Fred D'Aguiar Poems

Fred D'Aguiar Biography

Fred D'Aguiar (born 2 February 1960) is a British-Guyanese poet, novelist and playwright. He is currently Professor of English at Virginia Tech. Fred D'Aguiar was born in London in 1960 to Guyanese parents, Malcolm Frederick D'Aguiar and Kathleen Agatha Messiah. In 1962 he was taken to Guyana where he lived with his grandmother until 1972 when he returned, at the age of twelve, to England. D'Aguiar trained as a psychiatric nurse before reading African and Caribbean Studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury, graduating in 1985. On graduating he applied for a PhD on the Guyanese author Wilson Harris at the University of Warwick, but - after winning two writers-in-residency positions, at Birmingham University and the University of Cambridge (where he was the Judith E. Wilson Fellow from 1989 to 1990) - his PhD studies "recededed from [his] mind" and he began to focus all of his energies on creative writing. In 1994, D'Aguiar moved to the United States to take up a Visiting Writer position at Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts (1992–94). Since then, he has taught at Bates College, Lewiston, Maine (Assistant Professor, 1994–95) and the University of Miami where he held the position of Professor of English and Creative Writing. In 2003 he took up the position of Professor of English and Co-Director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Virginia Tech.)

The Best Poem Of Fred D'Aguiar

A Sporting Chance

If it's black you want then black you will get.
Each sunrise a ball kicked from one end of a blue field
Sails across to a black goal mouth and sinks into it and all
The lights in the stadium plunge out,
But the game never ends for another begins in a field
On the opposite side of this bigger ball we are all pinned to
Which responds to a giant kick as it spins around in an
Even bigger blue field, a ball wary of a hot foot, gearing up
So it seems, not for another kick, once and for all,
More for a death-dealing embrace,
As if a Euclidian dribble started eons ago
Is brought to an instantaneous stop,
A one-foot catch (not kick) and immediate burn up.

I cannot help but think this with the World Cup
When I hear about your lock up and the case
Made against you by the giant state,
I see this global football as you and the big foot
Of the Big Bang wielded at us all is like the boot
Swung at you that sends you into a black hole
For a portion of your life that adds up to an embrace
Of this oil-slicked planet by our sun in a starlit stadium;
Black for you means black for me for kingdom come.

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