Skin Can Hold
Vahni Capildeo, author of "Measures of Expatriation" (Forward Prize, 2016), returns with her third Carcanet collection, "Skin Can Hold". The collection marks an experimental departure for a traditionally pen-and-paper poet as she explores embodied practice – theatre, dance, and experimental performance. These texts are the fruit of those experiments and collaborations, drawing on her sporadic training in the techniques of burlesque and mime and, going further back, on her childhood fascination with Caribbean masquerade and French theatre.
The poems take various forms, from soliloquy to prose. They are astir with voices and bodies usually kept 'between the lines' of poetry: someone weeping outside the decorum of a lyric; polyglot workmen along an ivory-tower-city road. Commemorating the First World War, a rondeau threads the language of flowers with the language of the 'field postcard', in which national security required soldiers to communicate by crossing out options and adding nothing else.
The poems take various forms, from soliloquy to prose. They are astir with voices and bodies usually kept 'between the lines' of poetry: someone weeping outside the decorum of a lyric; polyglot workmen along an ivory-tower-city road. Commemorating the First World War, a rondeau threads the language of flowers with the language of the 'field postcard', in which national security required soldiers to communicate by crossing out options and adding nothing else.
About the author
Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, Vahni Capildeo has lived in the UK since 1991, where she has published four poetry collections including "Undraining Sea" (2009), "Dark and Unaccustomed Words" (2012) – longlisted for the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature – and "Utter" (2013). She read English at Christ Church, Oxford and subsequently became a Rhodes Scholar there, studying Old Norse and translation theory, before undertaking a Research Fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge. It was there that she completed her first two books, "No Traveller Returns" (2003) and "Person Animal Figure" (2005). A long-time contributing editor to the Caribbean Review of Books, she is also contributing advisor to Black Box Manifold. In addition to poetry she also writes prose; excerpts from her book-length work One Skattered Skeleton have been published in various places, including Ian Sinclair's "London: City of Disappearances" (2006).