Grace Notes by Fred D’Aguiar

Description

In this work of ‘grief art’ D’Aguiar’s tribute to the inimitable Grace draws symphonically from political chaos, the objects of loss and the corners of rooms now empty… here we find linguistic tension beautifully sprung between those left behind and she who lights the way forward, who steps into grief time and then wryly out again with the force of a poetic line holding two impossibilities together in an eternal embrace.
Sandeep Parmar

Grace Notes is a work of elegy, of diary, of impossible address, whose quiet intimacy registers the passing of days and of a single, singular life. While themselves consummately graceful, these are poems which go ‘beyond what it means to have grace’. Part of their charm, indeed, is their modesty, their good cheer and light-footedness, even in the face of loss. With delicate strokes, D’Aguiar paints a portrait reminiscent of Wordsworth’s idea that a good life might consist in ‘little, nameless, unremembered, acts / Of kindness and of love’. Grace Notes represents a poet at the height of his powers, who assumes nothing about the world, and can therefore give it back to us all the brighter.
Sarah Howe

About Fred D’Aguiar:

Fred D’Aguiar was born in London of Guyanese parents, and grew up in Guyana before returning to London for his secondary and tertiary education. He has lived in the US since the mid-90s and currently he is Professor of English at UCLA. He trained as a psychiatric nurse before reading African and Caribbean Studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury. He was Judith E. Wilson Fellow at Cambridge University and has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

About Fair Acre Press:

Fair Acre Press has published the highly regarded poets Mario Petrucci, Martin Figura and Selima Hill; the acclaimed NHS anthology These are the Hands; the prize-winning #MeToo anthology; the Ted Hughes Award for New Poetry-winning play by Kate O’Reilly; the first novel of polymath and nature writer Charles Foster; and other eclectic award-winning and 5 star reviewed books. Please click here for more information on other books published by Fair Acre Press. 

First poem of the Pamphlet:

1

Laoš Janáček plays for you
as if his piano could be
what you would be like
brought back to life
in some shape other than
what we grew to know, love.

We miss you every day.
We wonder at all times
how you would view some
thing that happens without
you here with us to see it,
that is how we share it

with you as days line up
between your absence our
continued time moving on
toward the same fate that
took you from us,
left us scrambling

to keep up carrying on
with each note of Janáček
strung on your behalf
along keys of our spines
strings of our nerves,
chambers of our hearts.