Like a Tree, Walking

by Vahni Capildeo

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781800171954
Publisher:	Carcanet Press, Limited
Publication date:	01/27/2022
Pages:	104
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Vahni (Anthony Ezekiel) Capildeo FRSL is a Trinidadian Scottish writer of poetry and non-fiction. Capildeo's eight books and nine pamphlets include Skin Can Hold (Carcanet, 2019) and The Dusty Angel (Oystercatcher, 2021). Their interests include plurilingualism, traditional masquerade, and multidisciplinary collaboration. They are Writer in Residence and Professor at the University of York, a Visiting Scholar at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and an Honorary Student of Christ Church, Oxford.

Table of Contents

When i called

In Praise of Birds 13

Plague Poems 17

Towards an Unwalking 21

Like a tree, walking

Walk #2 29

Sweetheart! Is So You Stop? / Ceci n'est pas du calypso 30

Walk #3 32

How Silence Surrounds 33

Walk #5 34

Stylish Deer 35

Walk #6 38

Cité de Lumière / Light Site 39

Walk #7 40

Erasure as Shinethrough / L'Amour a Besoin de Réalité 41

Nocturne #1 43

On the Way Somewhere 44

Nocturne #5 45

Reader, I Turn Men into Deer 47

Nocturne #6 48

Dark Times My Love 50

Nocturne #7 51

Holy Island 52

Lullaby # 1 53

Erasure as Drift / Kinde Yernings 54

Lullaby #2 59

Love in the Time of New Media 58

Lullaby #4 59

If There Is an Afterwards 60

Lullaby #7 61

Revolution Time 62

No metaphor

After an Unspeaking 67

Windrush Reflections 72

In Praise of Trees 80

Cause breath to enter

For Whom the Moon 87

Violent Triage 89

Odyssey Response 91

Acknowledgements 101

Editorial Reviews

'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

 

'Capildeo remains a sui generis talent.' —The Telegraph

 

'She is, among much else, a direct and sensual poet, warmly intimate and very funny.' —The Guardian

From the Publisher