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“... Two policemen (I remember there were at least two) stopped me and gave me a bunch of red, red roses. I nursed them with ice and water mixed with soluble aspirin. The roses had an instant bloom attracting stares and points from children; toddlers cried and ran. This is not the season for roses everyone said, you must have done something to procure them ...”

“... Buttocks Pert cushions with a limited supply of blood, and heat. Buns that can grab. They rob the high-jumper of that extra centimetre, costing the world record. They deny the ballet dancer that perfect straight line while tucking in the tail. An innocent slap on the backside is never an innocent slap on the backside. We would take from our buttocks to save our face but not from our face to save our buttocks ...”

“... Tower – noble and lonely as the last chess-piece on the board. How I could hug a man like this! Fred D’Aguiar is garrulous. He has plenty to write about (racism, the police, exile and homecoming, the bombardments of Englishness) but not enough artistry. His nine-sonnet sequence, ‘Sonnets from Whitley Bay’, is full of glum sub-Larkinian accuracy ...”

“... position of McIlvanney or the Dunn of Barbarians: certainly some of the writers anthologised by Fred D’Aguiar as representatives of ‘Black British Poetry’ make interesting links with other analogous predicaments. D’Aguiar himself takes as the epigraph to his introduction Stephen Dedalus’s description of ...”

“... three Northern Irish poets, he is a mellifluous teller of fairytales, though in a downbeat idiom. Fred D’Aguiar, meanwhile, who was born in London but brought up in Guyana, is ‘only’ 25. It shows a bit. The poems in English are awkward in syntax, uppity, rough at the edges. He writes more fluently in dialect, but not with the sing-song confidence ...”

“... It was as a poet that Fred D’ Aguiar first won recognition, with his 1985 collection Mama Dot, set in the Guyanese village where the English-born D’ Aguiar was sent to be educated. The place is dominated by Mama Dot, the archetypal grandmother, source of wisdom, comfort and discipline, a woman so important that when she falls ill nature itself goes to pieces: Bees abandon their queens to red ants and bury Their stings in every moving thing; and the sun Sticks like the hands of a clock at noon, Drying the very milk in coconuts to powder ...”

“... from Brian Coffey (1905-95) and Jonathan Griffin (1906-90) to Catherine Walsh (b. 1964) and Fred D’Aguiar (b. 1960), and represent a wide diversity of poetic practices. They also tell us the names of another fifty-odd poets they would have liked to put in – ‘significant omissions’ we can pursue elsewhere. As a rule, anthology introductions ...”

“... engaged poem we should have more of. Although Ken Smith, Tony Harrison, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Fred D’Aguiar and David Constantine can be found in one or both anthologies, we get the sense, in Armitage and Crawford especially, that ‘democratic’ has dwindled into a synonym for talking colloquially about modern things. What we will not find in ...”

“... London, its tastes and smells, the ‘offal and ash’ of its streets. Equiano turns up again in Fred D’Aguiar’s long poem Sweet Thames (1992). He is described as he sails up the Thames for the first time at the end of the 1750s. ‘So vehemently does he implore Equiano to "give me your hand, extend it/from your slaver’s time to mine,”’ Sandhu ...”