Caribbean Beat — January/February 2017 (#143)

“I have always been
moved by poems that have
the compendiousness of
novels,” Capildeo says
Adrian Pope, courtesy the Forward Arts Foundation
Oral histories, stories, and poetic works do not depend on such
margins. And why can’t prose, they ask, be put in service of
poetry?
Yet Capildeo’s books do not have the air of theoretical
treatises. They come alive as perspectives, times, and places
shift. The prose poems draw attention to themselves, as if to
remind us every now and again that this chunk of text should
not be limited. Consider the moment from “A Book of Hours:
From Aidoneus to Zeus”, a poem in Undraining Sea, when a man
encounters a presence:
Then, standing in the corridor that lacks any intruder, the
man on
his day off screams
He screams
screams realising he will see it again.
The line breaks and use of punctuation (lack of full stop;
capitalisation of the next line) draw attention to the fact that this
is poetic language being disrupted, like the man’s perception
is interrupted. The poet at once transcends and re-affirms the
medium; just as a filmmaker might leave in subtle reminders of
craft and magic.
And Capildeo’s poems sometimes work like films, even if
she does not aim to let us see characters as a film might. The
narration is part of a sequence. Elements are presented one
after the other, and the relationship between them (or lack
thereof) is what creates something, does something to readers
cinematographically.
Like mid-twentieth-century American poets such as James
Wright, Capildeo is concerned with deep image, though she
pushes that concept to even more dynamic moorings. Here are
deep songs, deep films, deep dances, deep Carnival mas bands.
The poet revels in this mental imagery, sometimes for lyrical
purposes, at other times to scorch. The result is far from difficult;
it is successful. The innards of the stage are laid bare. We travel
across terrains, experience the psychogeography of bedrooms
and cities alike. And each poem is its own animal. A reader is
free to make and repurpose what the poet has presented. In fact,
nothing more is expected.
The political within everyday situations forms another key
strand in all of Capildeo’s books, starting with the opening
poem of her debut, No Traveller Returns. In “Amulet”, a
conversation between voices shows up what might be called
micro-aggressions. The very first line, “That’s an unusual pendant
you are wearing,” is a statement loaded with judgments and
therefore appropriations. We recognise this conversation: it might
be banal banter at a reception or a party. Yet we are given room
to fill in the gaps, to invest questions of gender, race, economic
status, work hierarchy, educational background, and more. When
the wearer of the amulet declares a desire to sleep for two full
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