Reviews

• very good

• An interesting book containing thought-provoking poems and prose with many different cultural influences.

• Forward Prize winner Vahni Capildeo has given me a new way of thinking about poetry. The Forward Prizes in Poetry are given annually by the Forward Arts Foundation in the United Kingdom. They were established in 1992 by philanthropist William Sieghart to “celebrate excellence in poetry and increase its audience.” The prizes are awarded annually to published poets with works in print in the last year, and are given in three categories – best collection, best first collection, and best published poem. The prize awards are significant – 15,000 pounds for best collection, 5,000 pounds for best first collection, and 1,000 pounds for best published poem. (At current exchange rates, that’s about $20,000, $6,500, and $1,300, respectively.) Vahni Capildeo, whose ” Measures of Expatriation” is winner of the prize for best collection, was born in 1973 in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. She moved to London in 1991. It’s perhaps not surprising that much of her poetry, and especially in this collection, deals with the displacement of expatriation. In a sense, she and her family were double expatriates – of Hindu ancestry in the Caribbean culture of Trinidad and then Trinidadian expats in London. This work honored with the Forward Prize is many things simultaneously: moving and jarring, emotional and razor-sharp rational, reflections on the past and calculated looks at the present. The forms Capildeo uses in “Measures of Expatriation” underscores both the range of what she’s describing as well as the sense of dislocation she’s experienced. It includes prose poems, some so long as to resemble short stories. It includes more traditional free verse forms. And it includes poems and prose poems that like meditations than poems. Here is one of the collection’s works, using the more recognizable poetry form. Marginal An egg is divided into shell and meat. When I bent to my task during the victory visit, light banged its gongs and passed, with a traveling step, through me. I was halves: yolk and pallor, brittle and sky, blankness and savour, scoop and scorn, loft and huddle, core and cry; was another musician bare and ashamed in a yellow slave skirt. I played hard. Played wrong. He stopped in his progress, for this was his talent: displaying his goodwill; impersonal, merciful latin approbation. A thrown-cloak equivalent where we were not Latin and he was imperial. Our error, his notes. Capildeo is the author of several poetry collections, including “No Traveler Returns” (2003); “Person Animal Figure” (2005); “Undraining Sea” (2009); “Dark & Unaccustomed Words” (2012); “Utter” (2013); and “Simple Complex Shapes” (2015). “Measures of Expatriation” was published this year. She received a D.Phil. in Old Norse from Christ Church, Oxford. She was named the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at the University of Cambridge in 2014 and received the Harper-Woods Scholarship from the University of Cambridge in 2015. In addition to university work, she has worked for the Commonwealth Foundation, the Oxford English Dictionary, and as a volunteer for Oxfam and Rape Crisis. She won the Forward Prize for best published poem in 2009. “Measures of Expatriation” is one of the more remarkable collections I’ve read in a long time, challenging my notions of what a poetry collection is and can be. It’s well deserving of the Forward Prize.

• This isn't poetry that sings, or at least, not immediately. First of all, I think prose poetry is probably very hard to do well. Otherwise, it's just a lump of text for the reader to plough through, frequently emerging none the wiser. At its worst, prose poetry can appear like sheer laziness, giving the task fully to reader to make poetry out of the blurb. Secondly, the poetry, such as it is obscure. It could be argued this is more self-referencing guff from hallowed academia, it could be argued this contains the kernel of good ideas and the potential for great imagery. But...at times, particularly with the prose poetry, it appears wordy and maybe even self-indulgent. It is as if it were written for a coterie of readers that the author knows. It isn't going to move you or change you. It'll make you frown trying to read it, though.

• Some of the prose is excellent. Much of the poetry is too intent on innovation, and fails as lyric. Maybe it's me.

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