Like a Tree Walking
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.
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.
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).