Venus as a Bear

by Vahni Capildeo

Overview

The Poetry Book Society Summer 2018 Choice
Shortlisted for The 2018 Forward Prize for Best Collection

Vahni Capildeo’s Venus as a Bear collects poems on animals, art, language, the sea, thinghood, metaphor, description, and dance. They tend toward, and tend to, the inanimate and non-human, tenderly disclosing their forms of sentience. We have feelings for creatures, objects and places, but where do these affinities come from? How do things, as things, affect us, remain mysterious while making themselves known?

For Capildeo, answers formed at their own pace, while waiting for lambing at a friend’s farm; exploring the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford; criss-crossing the British Isles with the Out of Bounds poetry project; or hearing of Africa and the Romans in Scotland, of Guyana and Shakespeare, while standing over-the-boots deep in a freezing sea off the coast of Wales.

Many of the poems respond to real places, objects and people, as investigations, meditations, or dedications. They dwell on bodies and dwell in the body, inviting ardent, open forms of reading, in the spirit of their composition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781784105549
Publisher:	Carcanet Press, Limited
Publication date:	04/26/2018
Edition description:	None
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Vahni Capildeo’s multilingual, cross-genre writing is grounded in time experienced through place. Her DPhil in Old Norse literature and translation theory, her travels, and her Indian diaspora/Caribbean background deepen the voices in the landscapes that inspire her. Her poetry (six books and four pamphlets) includes Measures of Expatriation, awarded the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2016. She has worked in academia; in culture for development, with Commonwealth Writers; and as an Oxford English Dictionary lexicographer. Capildeo held the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellowship and the Harper-Wood Studentship at Cambridge. She is currently a Douglas Caster Cultural Fellow at the University of Leeds.

Table of Contents

Creatures

Welcome 13

Day, with Hawk 14

Stone Curlew (Looking for a) 15

Gilberte Said Lizards 17

Brant Geese 20

The Pets of Others 21

Catifesto 22

They (May Forget (Their Names (If Let Out))) 23

Shameless Acts of Ekphrasis

Saying Yes to Zeus 25

The Last Night, A Nightingale 26

Museum Stands In 27

A Table of My Own 28

Latona and Her Children 29

Dog or Wolf 30

Through & Through 31

Circle 35

Kiskadee 36

Venus as a Bear: The Cabin Boy's Prayer 37

The Antonine Wall 38

Langues/Tongues

Leaves/Feuilles/Falls 42

Two Foreign 46

Four Presents with Petrarch 47

After Catullus 5 50

Bullshit 52

After Hávamál 53

Evolving @ 54

Novena Body Parts 55

Sea Here

Tic Tac Toe 60

Tending 61

Salthill Blue for Mr Laughlin 62

Inishbofin: I 63

Inishbofin: II 64

Inishbofin: III 65

Inishbofin: IV 66

Seastairway 67

Waterloo, Trinidad 69

Some Things

Strong as Roses 71

Trinidad Sugar 72

Moss, for Maya 73

Orchids, for Maya 74

Seed, for Maya 76

Heirloom Rose, for Maya 77

Fossil Trade, for Maya 79

Björk/Birch Tree 80

Crossing Borders 82

Like… Like&hellip

Charlotte Street 88

& When Desire for Air… 89

She Sells&hellip by the Sea Shore 90

Innocents 91

Riddles 93

Music/Avant Toute Chose

The Magnificent Pigs of Thetford 97

Catgut 101

When Sitting in the Kitchen Is Like Being&hellip 102

The Seething Sea 103

Envoi 104

Acknowledgements 107

Index of Places 109