Caribbean Beat — January/February 2017 (#143)

months, this is not just a shutting down of the conversation, but a
changing of the playing field. We are invited to think of different
realms, to dream of dreaming.
Another important poem in her first book is “In Cunaripo”, an
example of how narrative in Capildeo’s poetry is often inflected.
Animals — in this case, caimans — irrupt within the confines
of what is being described, not to re-enforce the arbitrary
distinction between animal and human, but to do the opposite.
The caimans are in character.
And while Capildeo can be described as a poet of globalisation,
this is just one strand in a diverse body of concerns.
“Pin them down at your peril,” remarked Forward Prize
founder William Sieghart, on Capildeo’s book and the work of
the other poets honoured last year. In a blog piece for the UK
Guardian, Sieghart recalled hearing Capideo read from her work
at the Royal Festival Hall in London on the night the prize was
announced. “She spoke as if addressing an invisible hawk,”
he wrote. “She told us the idea for her poem, ‘Handfast’, was
inspired by a hunting glove belonging to Henry VIII, that most
dominant of English kings. Hawks are Ted Hughes territory. A
glove? No, Capildeo . . . was throwing down a gauntlet.”
Capildeo troubles the nation, place, education, fauna, and
even how we process day and night as individuals. She embodies
what D.H. Lawrence meant when he said, “the essential quality
of poetry is that it makes a new effort of attention, and ‘discovers’
a new world within the known world.”
Her latest book is an amplification of many of the themes
apparent in Capildeo’s previous works. “Measures of Expatriation
was my attempt to go both wide in place and deep in time, the
way we do in our lives,” Capildeo says. “We do not see our own
width and depth the same way if we are following ‘a character’ in
a film or book, or the ‘voice’ of a single, shorter poem. I tried to
create a series of imaginative extensions and portals.”
Vahni Capildeo’s books
No Traveller Returns (Salt, 2003)
Person Animal Figure (Landfill, 2005)
Undraining Sea (Egg Box, 2009)
Dark and Unaccustomed Words (Egg Box, 2011)
Utter (Peepal Tree Press, 2013)
Simple Complex Shapes (Shearsman, 2015)
Measures of Expatriation (Carcanet, 2016)
The book, she explains, was written over six years, and
arguably has the same kind of impact a novel might. “I have
always been moved by poems that have the compendiousness
of novels,” Capildeo says. “Most years, I set myself an exercise
of reading a long poem or series of connected works aloud over
a number of days, beginning every day religiously with a portion
of the poem, before breakfast or human contact or anything
else, in that vulnerable gap when the mind is engaged in both its
night and daytime states. There are moments in this process of
reading that feel unbearable.”
In her poems, layers of meaning create dazzling whirlpools:
what Vivek Narayanan refers to as “the working and reworking
of grammar, in its flow or its sudden arrest, through absence,
or through, often, a kind of semic overloading.” In “A Book of
Hours: From Aidoneus to Zeus”, “amber” begins as a name,
but then becomes colour, texture, signal. In “Winter to Winter”,
structures and systems of naming suggest the complexity of
overlapping layers of personality. Cardinal points, literary
devices, verbs, colours, situations, imperatives are used as
markers simultaneously.
The effect of all of this is poetry that is impossible to box. “I
shed forms like a shapeshifter shedding skins,” Capildeo says.
Readers be warned, then fly in. n
Adrian Pope, courtesy the Forward Arts Foundation
Opposite page Vahni Capildeo
at the 2016 Forward Prize
ceremony
Left The three winners of the
2016 Forward Prizes: Sasha
Dugdale (Best Single Poem),
Tiphanie Yanique (Best First
Collection), and Capildeo (Best
Collection)
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