The 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.