Venus as a Bear
Vahni Capildeo's new book lives with things – carefully, lovingly: with glass, with moss, with stone. "Venus as a Bear" places the non-human world at its centre, tenderly disclosing the ways in which it is alive. We have feelings for familiar or strange creatures, objects, or places, but where do these affinities come from? For Capildeo the answers formed at their own pace, while waiting for lambing at a friend's farm, on a tour with poets around 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. This book considers how things, as things, affect us, remaining mysterious while making themselves known.
Many of the poems in "Venus as a Bear" are short. Some consider art objects of various types and periods: an Italian bronze sculpture of a dog -cum-wolf, a Persian painting of a bulbul. Some of the poems are set in the natural world and respond to real places, objects, and people, as investigations, meditations, or dedications. At root the poems, like the worlds they touch on, respect the actual in all its volatile mystery.
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).
