Demerara whose east coast raised me
From a mere stalk to stand straight

To stand tall no matter what current
Help me find your grain your flow
And Demerara sweeten me

So my art keeps your river's caveat
Your sense of cane fields bathed in sweat

from 'Demerara Sugar' by Fred D'Aguiar

Continental Shelf traces a journey, across continents and from youth to maturity. It moves from memories of childhood in Guyana, through a long elegiac exploration of the shootings at Virginia Tech University in 2006, to the reflective closing section which gives its title to the book. Fred D'Aguiar celebrates individuals and the histories embedded in places. He conjures up a sensuous childhood world of characters, stories, a loved particularity - a smell of bitumen, the local hero who comes last in a National Cycle Championship, a distant train's incantation of 'greenheart, mora, baromalli' - impressions so distinct and powerful that 'fumes... spin my head / Back whenever I catch a whiff from a car'. In D'Aguiar's Elegies for the thirty-three people who died in Virginia, that loss of unique and particular individuals is mourned, in a scrutiny of what civil and private life has become, and how, alongside grief, we may recover delight in the world. In his first full-length collection since Bill of Rights (1998), D'Aguiar celebrates how imagination and memory enable us to cope with violence and death. Love, above all, is the mainstay.

Contents


Local Colour


Bring Back, Bring Back
A Clean Slate
The Return
At Sea
Reap
Calypso
Railway
Tributary
H2O
Matriarch
Something Imagined
Tamarind Season
Playing House
R O Y G B I V
Caribbean
Bullroarer
The Barber-Green
Caiman
Snake and Ladder
After Birth
Ledge
Pan
S-Joe
Dara Singh
Demerara Sugar
Leaving
Sabbatic
The Shell Pond
National Cycle Championship
Subaltern
The Never-Never
Houses not Homes
Guyana Dreaming Wilson Harris
Local Colour
Succession

Elegies

Continental Shelf

Well
Martial Art
3am
Jump Rope
Moonwalk
Star Fruit
Continental Shelf