SOURCE: “Towards a Revelation,” in Times Literary Supplement, July 7-13, 1989, p. 737.

In the following review, O'Brien concludes that Airy Hall is a mixture of “disappointment” and “refreshing ambition.”

The title sequence of Fred D'Aguiar's second collection, Airy Hall, consists of eighteen poems about the Guyanan village where his boyhood was spent. It expands and enriches the prose account D'Aguiar gave in Poetry Review (Volume 75, Number 2, August 1985), and emphasizes his gifts in handling the evidence of the senses. Dry washing is heard “chattering” on a line; leaves “describe a slowed, / ziggurat fall”; a whole section of “Airy Hall at Night” brilliantly evokes the horrible toadness of a trodden-on toad. According to D'Aguiar, Airy Hall is a place you could drive or sprint through without noticing it, and he convincingly re-creates its remoteness, its heat, its stillness, its seemingly uneventful secrecy. At a barely explicit level, though, he seems to...