Measures of Expatriation [electronic resource]
Capildeo, Vahni2016
eBook
Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection and Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize (2016). Born in Trinidad and resident in the UK, Capildeo rejects the easy depiction of a person as a neat, coherent whole - ‘pure is a strange word’ - embracing instead a pointilliste self, one grounded in complexity. In these texts sense and syntax are disrupted; languages rub and intersect; dream sequences, love poems, polylogues and borrowed words build into a precarious self-assemblage. ‘Cliché’, she writes, ‘is spitting into the sea’, and in this book poetry is still a place where words and names, with their power to bewitch and subjugate, may be disrupted, reclaimed. The politics of the body, and cultures of sexual objectification, gender inequality and casual racism, are the borders across which Capildeo homes, seeking the modest luxury of being ‘looked at as if one is neutral ground’. In the end it is language itself, the determination to speak, to which the poet finds she belongs: ‘Language is my home, I say; not one particular language.’ Measures of Expatriation is in the vanguard of literature arising from the aftermath of Empire, with a fearless and natural complexity.
Main title:
Author:
Work:
Imprint:
[Place of publication not identified] : Carcanet Poetry, 2016
Collation:
1 online resource (1 text file)
ISBN:
9781784101695
Language:
English
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BRN:
2803957