Search results for ""author vahni capildeo""

Shortlisted 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.

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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.

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Vahni Capildeo is the author of the poetry collections "Dark & Unaccustomed Words," "No Traveller Returns," "Person Animal Figure," and "Undraining"" Sea," and her work has appeared in the anthologies "Identity Parade," "In the Telling," and "The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse." She is a contributing editor and the UK agent and representative for the "Caribbean Review of Books" and a member of the International Advisory Board for the "Journal of Indo-Caribbean Studies."

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The world-renowned UEA Creative Writing MA presents a selection of new poets. Founded in 1992, course tutors and students have included Owen Sheers, Kathryn Simmonds, Denise Riley, Andrew Motion, Ben Borek, Lavinia Greenlaw, George Szirtes, Matthew Hollis, Adam Foulds, Hugo Williams, Daniel Kane, and Anthony Thwaite. Buy this to glimpse the future of new poetry in Britain and further afield."No house-style, no ready-mades, simply original thinking, original writing from from an exciting set of individual voices." - George Szirtes

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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.

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'Expatriation: my having had a patria, a fatherland, to leave, did not occur to me until I was forced to invent one. [...] This luxury of inattention, invention, and final mismatch...a 'Trinidad' being created that did not take my Trinidad away (my Trinidad takes itself away, in reality, over time)...that is expatriation, no? An exile, a migrant, a refugee, would have been in more of a hurry, would have been more driven out or driven towards, would have been seeking and finding not.'In Measures of Expatriation Vahni Capildeo's poems and prose-poems speak of the complex alienation of the expatriate, and address wider issues around identity in contemporary Western society. Born in Trinidad and resident in the UK, Capildeo rejects the easy depiction of a person as a neat, coherent whole - 'pure is a strange word' -embracing instead a pointilliste self, one grounded in complexity. In these texts sense and syntax are disrupted; languages rub and intersect; dream sequences, love poems, polylogues and borrowed words build into a precarious self-assemblage.' Cliche', she writes, 'is spitting into the sea', and in this book poetry is still a place where words and names, with their power to bewitch and subjugate, may be disrupted, reclaimed. The politics of the body, and cultures of sexual objectification, gender inequality and casual racism, are the borders across which Capildeo homes, seeking the modest luxury of being 'looked at as if one is neutral ground'. In the end it is language itself, the determination to speak, to which the poet finds she belongs: 'Language is my home, I say; not one particular language.' Measures of Expatriation is in the vanguard of literature arising from the aftermath of Empire, with a fearless and natural complexity. 'Expatriation: my having had a patria, a fatherland, to leave, did not occur to me until I was forced to invent one. [...] This luxury of inattention, invention, and final mismatch...a 'Trinidad' being created that did not take my Trinidad away (my Trinidad takes itself away, in reality, over time)...that is expatriation, no? An exile, a migrant, a refugee, would have been in more of a hurry, would have been more driven out or driven towards, would have been seeking and finding not.'

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'The new and most heartening aspect of the well-crafted poems you will read in this book is... their capacity to express and explore ecologies of feeling and being. They do not censor their capacity for metamorphosis... Here is a gathering of itinerants, who all have been habited in the University of East Anglia's land' - Vahni CapildeoFeaturing work by: Helen Akers • Kirsteen Anderson • Geffen Bankir • Rachel Cleverly • Lili Cooper • Jade Cuttle • Alison Graham • Amanda Holiday • T. E. Irvine • Mari Lavelle-Hill • Deshawn McKinney • Laia Sales Merino • Ryan Norman

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