Obviously, it’s selfish in that I’m interested in my own mixed heritage and in a space opened by the amalgamation of two different traditions. How did they meet and what was likely to happen? What was the opposition? Just to show,” he adds with a smile, “how fortunate I am, and that skinheads are no big deal.”It is the first indication that Fred D’Aguiar speaks and writes from bitter experience. He speaks eloquently of growing up in London and becoming aware of blackness as a negative thing “I didn’t want to become political!” he confesses. “I wanted to have a good time – it was the Seventies! it was disco! – but you had to In the middle of the Carnival you had some serious riots.

My historical imagination wasn’t an accident, it was made through those experiences, which is why I think I argue for an aesthetics that is political, for a muse that’s a card-carrying humanitarian.”Much of what he discovered he explored in his collection, British Subjects, but he feels there is scope for plenty more. His mother still lives in south London, as do his brother, a bus driver, and his sons from his first marriage If the right job came up, he’d be back like a bullet. “I’ve got alimony to pay,” he explains wistfully.D’Aguiar adores his work at the University of Miami. “The seminar is an altar for me,” he declares with a faraway look.

“It’s a great space where you suspend the world outside and look at the poem as an utterance, the lyric as a contemplative space… it’s messianic!” I am reminded that his first collection was dedicated to his grandmothers, one of whom bore the name Edna Messiah. He laughs – “It’s quite a name, isn’t it?” – but is soon back in the world of poetic utterance. “Were it a pool,” he announces dreamily, “you could dive into it and come out the other side altered.”* Christina Patterson is director of the Poetry Society. In her long writing career, now spanning over half a century, Muriel Spark has produced a unique body of work.