Vahni Capildeo

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Biographical note:  Vahni Capildeo was born in 1973, in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. She came to England in 1991. This is her first book.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781876857882
ISBN-10:  1876857889
ISBN-13:  9781876857882
Author:  Vahni Capildeo
Title:  No Traveller Returns
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Apr-03
Extent:  184pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  11 mm
Weight:  276 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 11.99
Price:  USD 17.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  This poetry collection includes prose. Some pieces tell stories. Others half-express, half-explain, a certain pressure of situation. Poems in a book do not sound, or signify, as do poems extracted, or composed, to stand alone. The sequence matters, as does the whole. Prose, by the fact of its inclusion in a poetry collection, calls attention to its qualities, and to poetry’s differences, as it cannot do elsewhere.

Writers pick up on, think their way into, other voices. If this is objectionable, so is every attempt to understand others. The words on my pages derive from various areas in my mental landscape. One example: having read some Anglo-Saxon, the poetry of a people who understood the sea, I sought a way to render the rhythms and memories that, in England, recalled me to Trinidad. Without imitation, without the superimposition of one tradition on another experience, different bindings of language became available to tie and loosen what held my mind. The influences, and processes, are many and ongoing.

I realized that this shifting of modes, which initially seemed natural, was not universally obvious. This became a concern within the writing. Identity politics; the lyrical I; were inadequate to a sense of self evolving from others and their words, accessible or arcane.

This book is an autobiography, moving outwards from Trinidad; from the mind that feels free to report on the world, into the mind that knows it must question itself. Finally it becomes a way of honouring the dead, a logical journey’s-end.

Table of contents:
The Mask in the Bone
Amulet
Education
White as Jasmine
In Cunaripo
For Dhumavati: Her Work
A Sense of Vanishing
Catch of the Day
i. Right There Outside
ii. Unruffled Surface
iii. Once Joined to the mainland
iv. Stop: Warning: Danger: Valentine
Inscription (Windward Isles)
Port-of-Spain
The Stars Looked Different There
Nothing Poem
Time is an Unkind Dancer
Climacteric
Turning Moment
White Lilac Time
Miss Havisham Will Not Burn
Light and Dark
Obsessive Talk
Twist
The Monster Scrapbook
Monster Postures
The Monstrous Task
Of the Character of Monsters
Desdemona Resuscitated
Monster Deception
Seeing Without Looking
In the Loft
Frameless by Choice
And Again
In the Loft
Monster Pastimes
I Hear the Monsters Singing
Charm
Monster Flattery
Lux Æterna Et Perpetua
Lactic Song
Tiredness Poem
Stalkers’ Top Ten
Silence Poem
The Mud Flats
Lux Æterna Et Perpetua
Shape of a Vase
At the Butterfly
Tenses
Monster Consciousness
Deep Colours Bleed
Monster Consciousness
In the Loft
Monster Ways
A Day Outside
Monster Hunting
The Religion of Love
Monster Hunting
Remove Packaging Before Use
Letter from a Monster to a monster in Scotland
What is You Guy Really Like?
Dry Clean Only
Monster Time
Monster Vision
King Vertigo and Queen Momentum
King Vertigo
Commuter Installation
Wisdom in Character
Gone to Pieces
King Vertigo
Queen Momentum
Summoning Up the Spirit
Felling Trees
Doppelgänger
Lilies
Fleshed Perspective
No Traveller Returns
A Reason to Light More Fires
No Traveller Returns
The Bleeding Obvious
Antigone
St. Munditia
Nattaraj

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Excerpt from book:  

Climacteric

Your story is twice-folded. Medicine induced
a saving menopause, once you were cut and hurt
to clear away the discord which produced itself
inside you, sickest spontaneity. Tides
are reversed, and knowledge overpowers you, full
yet preliminary, in process. You were aged,
and are returning, and will in nature age again,
pressured to beauty. At present, have your
meanwhile – your doubled year recovering
a subtler south.

Beauty. ‘She earned that face.’ They say
that, when a star turns thirty. Drying-out
bequeaths her cheekbones; steel weights
have fanned her swanning, aspirational neck.
But you – you have not earned that face. No,
you deserve serenity, the drizzled stresses
wisdom scans through youth. Look, how
your heightened skeleton pulls flesh into
transparencies, wearing ahead of time and
gravity! You work like that, drawing old lines
of music from among the ins and outs of
scribe and image, when you edit vellum
furred with light.

Motets will run like mirror for you, back and forth.

Review quote:  Beware. The wisdom and originality that elegantly smolders in these pages, drives a startling and beautiful linguistic gearing; crafted silver turning on faultless glass. It purrs, chants, snarls and whispers in a profound clarity of entanglements. Haunting and unhinging the readers path with stealth. No one leaves this book alone. Beware.

Brian Catling

Review quote:  This is an important literary debut: the sound of a new, unique, captivating voice. The journey she describes with such ferocity and such an ebullient, unexpected sense of fun is also emotional, and she entices the reader into travelling with her. She triumphantly disproves the pessimism of her title: undiscovered countries are here spread out before us, ready for exploration.

Peter Conrad

Review quote:  This extraordinary poetic sequence is a kind of linked fantasia, the unflagging play of a powerful intelligence and consciousness over a series of themes: monsters of self-awareness or personal encounters, interspersed with memories and mental insights of piercing power and sympathy. It is an astonishing debut.

Bernard O’Donoghue