Caribbean Beat — November/December 2018 (#154)

ookshelf
Venus as a Bear
by Vahni Capildeo (Carcanet Press, 112 pp, ISBN 9781784105549)
Do we walk anywhere without language,
even if we lack tongues, or speech? Venus
as a Bear takes us through Trinidad,
Oxfordshire, St Lucia, Puerto Rico, Iceland,
and beyond, bearing us in its capacious,
labyrinthine witness as we see heirloom
roses, the erstwhile hole-homes of
lizards, a woman who vanished in 1985
in Arima. Capildeo creates poems like
spyglasses, like fully-equipped decks of
observation, so that we might be present
and entranced, hooked in the startling,
surefooted immediacy of the worlds these
poems invoke.
Dip a toe into this dazzlingly epic
collection — epic in its scope, in the
subterranean depth of its wide-ranging
points of reference — and you will emerge
with treasure, whether it gleams or growls.
Capildeo’s poems take their frames
and habitations from trips to the Ashmolean Museum,
from Björk and Captain Beefheart. In “Kiskadee”, the
site of an open-air arts space in Woodbrook, Trinidad, is
transformed into an aviary, “every gate,
/ grid, grille, lock, key, alterable / level,
pock-marked wall, concrete / irregularity,
soft / and hung over with gauze, full /
of uncrushable feathers.” A quartet of
poems for Inishbofin in Irseland reveals a
contemplative study in positionality: the
speaker sees and perceives that “Heaven
is most probably underwater. / Sounding
with ease, increasing pressure on us. / Too
light for many stars. Too soon for most
birds.”
Venus as a Bear is a collection so
multifarious it could plausibly be said to
be about “everything,” without diminishing
the pleasure and fascination with which
you come to its openness. These poems
are not the reflection of one world, but the
navigation of several, where bulls roam the
streets in unselfconscious pride, where
children, left alone, befriend living moss. It is through work
such as this that we find ourselves revivified to a thousand
electric possibilities.
Voodoo Hypothesis
by Canisia Lubrin (Buckrider Books/Wolsak and
Wynn Publishers, 96 pp, ISBN 9781928088424)
St Lucia–born, Canadabased
Canisia Lubrin does the
extraordinary with her first fulllength
book of poems: not only
does Voodoo Hypothesis take no
prisoners, it questions the very
nature and validity of the prison
system. Which punitive hierarchy
is Lubrin tackling, you ask? Nothing
less than a colonial posture on
“blackness” itself. What happens,
these poems ask, when you hold
the doors of history, language, and science wide open, and
reoutfit the black experience in the raiment it deserves and
demands? You get verse awash with wonder and speculation,
alive to both reclaiming and reframing a wounded narrative.
The Commonwealth, Caliban, Crusoe: Lubrin targets
them and enflames their old significances, restrings them
into bold expressions of anti-conquest, anti-materiality.
This makes Voodoo Hypothesis a confident, capable reorigination,
unafraid to wreak needful havoc: “This is a hand
that intends to do its maker harm.”
Come Let Us Sing Anyway
by Leone Ross (Peepal Tree Press, 190 pp, ISBN
9781845233341)
Between the borders of the
macabre and the masterfully
erotic: that’s where you’ll find
the true north of Leone Ross’s
prose. Come Let Us Sing Anyway
is a collection of short fiction
as audacious as it is explorative:
herein, a British tourist finds she
can buy a baby in a foreign land,
but not steal it. A family lose their
son, and when he returns against
all hope or expectation, he is
changed in ways that make his father violently ill at night.
A woman takes and is taken by her paramour in a series of
mountingly shocking assignations; all the while she feels
her own gender pulse and shift with suggestion. Ross’s
dominion of form is on fine display: she’s equally effective
whether her stories serve up spare horror in flash fiction,
or in extended post-apocalyptic swathes. The effects are
ruinous, riotous, and rhapsodic.
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