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

Literature & Fiction

Capildeo, Vahni

Poetry

Carcanet Press Ltd.

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

<div>&nbsp;</div> <div>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.</div>

Skin Can Hold

Review\n'Industrious and prolific, Vahni Capildeo is a writer of apparently effortless variety in form and content... She belongs to no tribe or school or movement. This may make her a 'poet's poet', one for the cognoscenti; and yet... she deserves the widest audience possible.' —Times Literary Supplement\n'Capildeo remains a sui generis talent.' —The Telegraph\n'She is, among much else, a direct and sensual poet, warmly intimate and very funny.' —The Guardian\nShortlisted for the 2022 Jhalak Prize. 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

Exploring a universe where anything can happen, because there is nothing that can’t be imagined and there’s no connection between different experiences that can’t be made, Utter breaks down old boundaries: between the past and present, between human and animal, animate and inanimate, between the Caribbean and the global elsewhere, between the experienced world and the world of books. Vahni Capildeo rarely appears to speak in her own voice but creates a whole range of striking and sometimes mysterious personas; in the dialogue among the voices in the poems, a way of seeing, multifarious as it is, begins to emerge. The poems express a view that finds much in the world that is unjust, cruel, corrupt, and hypocritical but also finds moments of community and tenderness; there is darkness and there is humor, and sometimes the latter seems the only possible response to the former.

Utter

Peepal Tree Press Ltd.

This is an important literary debut: the sound of a new, unique, captivating voice. The journey Capildeo describes with such ferocity and such an ebullient, unexpected sense of fun is also emotional, and she entices the reader into travelling with her. Undiscovered countries are here spread out before us, ready for exploration.

No Traveller Returns

Salt Publishing

Odyssey Calling

Sad Press

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Books by Capildeo, Vahni