Vahni Capildeo

Vahni Capildeo is known for the experimental edge in her work and her love of collaborating on live performances with fellow poets. In this compelling new collection from the Trinidadian-born poet and Rhodes scholar, her uninhibited style invites us to delve deep between the lines and experience for ourselves the heartaches and emotional challenges that come from separation; both from a testing relationship and one's motherland.

Measures of Expatriation

Alice Oswald

Ian Duhig

Melissa Lee-Houghton

Forward Various

Forward Book of Poetry 2017

The Poetry Book Society Winter Choice 2021 Vahni Capildeo's Like a Tree, Walking is a fresh departure, even for this famously innovative poet. Taking its title from a story of sight miraculously regained, this book draws on Capildeo's interest in ecopoetics and silence. Many pieces originate in specific places, from nocturnes and lullabies in hilly Port of Spain to 'stillness exercises' recording microenvironments – emotional and aural – around English trees. These journeys offer a configuration of the political that makes a space for new kinds of address, declaration and relation. Capildeo takes guidance from vernacular traditions of sensitivity ranging from Thomas A Clark and Iain Crichton Smith to the participants in a Leeds libraries project on the Windrush. Like a Tree, Walking is finally a book defined by how it writes love.

Like a Tree, Walking

Following 'Person Animal Figure' and 'Undraining Sea', this is the most lyrical and playful part of Vahni Capildeo's three-part project exploring the boundaries of the human and the natural, and the ocean or musical possibilities of poetic form.

Dark and Unaccustomed Words

Longlisted for the 2020 BOCAS Prize for Caribbean Literature A Telegraph Book of the Year 2019 Vahni Capildeo, author of Measures of Expatriation (Forward Prize, 2016), returns with a third Carcanet volume, Skin Can Hold. The collection marks an adventurous departure for a pen-and-paper poet. These texts are the fruit of collaborative experiments in theatre, dance and other performance, drawing on burlesque and mime as well as Capildeo's fascination with Caribbean masquerade. The poems are astir with voices and bodies usually kept 'between the lines' of poetry: a weeping poltergeist disrupting the decorum of a lyric; polyglot workmen along an ivory-towercity road. Novels are turned inside out to become dramas of sleaze and surveillance.

Skin Can Hold

The Poetry Book Society Summer 2018 Choice Shortlisted for The 2018 Forward Prize for Best Collection Vahni Capildeo's Venus as a Bear collects poems on animals, art, language, the sea, thinghood, metaphor, description, and dance. They tend toward, and tend to, the inanimate and non-human, tenderly disclosing their forms of sentience. We have feelings for creatures, objects and places, but where do these affinities come from? How do things, as things, affect us, remain mysterious while making themselves known? For Capildeo answers formed at their own pace, while waiting for lambing at a friend's farm; exploring the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford; criss-crossing the British Isles with the Out of Bounds poetry project; or hearing of Africa and the Romans in Scotland, of Guyana and Shakespeare, while standing over-the-boots deep in a freezing sea off the coast of Wales. Many of the poems respond to real places, objects and people, as investigations, meditations, or dedications. They dwell on bodies and dwell in the body, inviting ardent, open forms of reading, in the spirit of their composition.

Venus as a Bear

This poetry collection includes prose. Some pieces tell stories. Others half-express, half-explain, a certain pressure of situation. Poems in a book do not sound, or signify, as do poems extracted, or composed, to stand alone. The sequence matters, as does the whole. Prose, by the fact of its inclusion in a poetry collection, calls attention to its qualities, and to poetry's differences, as it cannot do elsewhere.Writers pick up on, think their way into, other voices. If this is objectionable, so is every attempt to understand others. The words on my pages derive from various areas in my mental landscape. One example: having read some Anglo-Saxon, the poetry of a people who understood the sea, I sought a way to render the rhythms and memories that, in England, recalled me to Trinidad. Without imitation, without the superimposition of one tradition on another experience, different bindings of language became available to tie and loosen what held my mind. The influences, and processes, are many and ongoing.I realized that this shifting of modes, which initially seemed natural, was not universally obvious. This became a concern within the writing. Identity politics; the lyrical I; were inadequate to a sense of self evolving from others and their words, accessible or arcane.This book is an autobiography, moving outwards from Trinidad; from the mind that feels free to report on the world, into the mind that knows it must question itself. Finally it becomes a way of honouring the dead, a logical journey's-end.

No Traveller Returns

Vahni Capildeo's Odyssey Calling is a completely stunning work of velocity, vision and hospitality. These poems make you feel at home, except what is 'home'? They do not deal in public legitimacy: they do not speak properly, nor ask to be listened to properly. You seem a stranger to these poems, so probably they will treat you like a trickster god.

Vahni Capildeo

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