Fred D'Aguiar's Airy Hall was first published in 1989 and is reissued with a new preface by the poet as part of the Poetry Book Society's Back in Print list. Fred D'Aguiar grew up in Guyana and made his debut in 1985 with the acclaimed collection Mama Dot, a book that fixed attention on the author's grandmother. Airy Hall examines country life and thinks about place and displacement, childhood and its loss and the formation of a poet's sensibility shaped by nature and the politics of location at the edge of a former British colony. These poems are connected not just by theme but also by the vibrant style and exciting ambition which make them so outstanding. "His work finds newly inventive and exploratory ways of shaping a contemporary black British poetry, employing both oral vernacular 'Nation language' forms and standard English, and having frequent recourse to the materials of Guyanese childhood memory." Neil Corcoran in English Poetry since 1940