British Subjects - Softcover

Born in Britain but raised in Guyana, D'Aguiar returned to England at 12 and now lives in both London and America. These poems, however, grow from British soil, upon which he as a man of color may feel at home but is viewed as alien, one of the "throwaway people, the problem who won't go away." Consequently, his work carries on a search for belonging and reflects a nostalgia for a past he may never be able to claim. In it, observations of the exhilarating cultural rainbow to be seen at such occasions as the Notting Hill carnival mix with feelings of alienation and smoldering resentment, the latter laced with revolutionary zeal--"the one fever love can't appease." His sensual, visceral approach works best when he contemplates physical reality, as when he presents the heart, navel, hands, eyebrows, and buttocks as well as "Thirteen Views of a Penis" and mourns, "We are living in the decline of the Penis Age." Whitney Scott