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Forward Prize: “Measures of Expatriation” by Vahni Capildeo

By Glynn Young 7 Comments

Sandy ring - Forward Prize: “Measures of Expatriation” by Vahni Capildeo

Forward Prize winner Vahni Capildeo has given me a new way of thinking about poetry.

The Forward Prizes in Poetry are given annually by the Forward Arts Foundation in the United Kingdom. They were established in 1992 by philanthropist William Sieghart to “celebrate excellence in poetry and increase its audience.” The prizes are awarded annually to published poets with works in print in the last year, and are given in three categories—best collection, best first collection, and best published poem.

The prize awards are significant—15, 000 pounds for best collection, 5, 000 pounds for best first collection, and 1, 000 pounds for best published poem. (At current exchange rates, that’s about $20, 000, $6, 500, and $1, 300, respectively.)

Vahni Capildeo, whose Measures of Expatriation is winner of the prize for best collection, was born in 1973 in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. She moved to London in 1991. It’s perhaps not surprising that much of her poetry, especially in this collection, deals with the displacement of expatriation. In a sense, she and her family were double expatriates —of Hindu ancestry in the Caribbean culture of Trinidad, and then Trinidadian expats in London.

This work honored with the Forward Prize is many things simultaneously: moving and jarring, emotional and razor-sharp rational, reflections on the past and calculated looks at the present. The forms Capildeo uses in Measures of Expatriation underscore both the range of what she’s describing as well as the sense of dislocation she’s experienced. It includes prose poems, some so long as to resemble short stories. It includes more traditional free verse forms. And it includes poems and prose poems that read more like meditations than poems.

Here is one of the collection’s works, using the more recognizable poetry form.

Marginal

Forward Prize Measures of ExpatriationAn egg is divided
into shell and meat.
When I bent to my task
during the victory visit,
light banged its gongs and passed,
with a traveling step, through me.
I was halves:
yolk and pallor,
brittle and sky,
blankness and savour,
scoop and scorn,
loft and huddle,
core and cry;
was another musician
bare and ashamed
in a yellow slave skirt.
I played hard.
Played wrong.
He stopped in his progress,
for this was his talent:
displaying his goodwill;
impersonal, merciful
latin approbation.
A thrown-cloak equivalent
where we were not Latin
and he was imperial.
Our error, his notes.

Forward Prize Vahni Capildeo

Vahni Capildeo

Capildeo is the author of several poetry collections, including No Traveler Returns (2003); Person Animal Figure (2005); Undraining Sea (2009); Dark & Unaccustomed Words (2012); Utter (2013); and Simple Complex Shapes (2015). Measures of Expatriation was published this year. She received a D.Phil. in Old Norse from Christ Church, Oxford. She was named the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at the University of Cambridge in 2014 and received the Harper-Woods Scholarship from the University of Cambridge in 2015. In addition to university work, she has worked for the Commonwealth Foundation, the Oxford English Dictionary, and as a volunteer for Oxfam and Rape Crisis. She won the Forward Prize for best published poem in 2009.

Measures of Expatriation is one of the more remarkable collections I’ve read in a long time, challenging my notions of what a poetry collection is and can be. It’s well deserving of the Forward Prize.

Next week: Tiphanie Yanique’s Wife, which won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

Browse more poets and poems

Photo by Derek Gavey,  Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young, author of the novels Dancing Priest and A Light Shining, and Poetry at Work.

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Glynn Young
Glynn Young
Editor and Twitter-Party-Cool-Poem-Weaver at Tweetspeak Poetry
Glynn Young lives in St. Louis where he retired as the team leader for Online Strategy & Communications for a Fortune 500 company. Glynn writes poetry, short stories and fiction, and he loves to bike. He is the author of the Civil War romance Brookhaven, as well as Poetry at Work and the Dancing Priest Series. Find Glynn at Faith, Fiction, Friends.
Glynn Young
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Comments

  1. Maureen says

    November 15, 2016 at 12:47 pm

    ‘light banged its gongs’ is such a marvelous image. Love the collection’s title, too.

    It’s interesting to watch the trend in prose poetry.

    Reply
    • Glynn says

      November 15, 2016 at 7:56 pm

      I don’t think I’ve read a collection quite like this one. Thanks for reading and the comment!

      Reply
  2. Bethany R. says

    November 15, 2016 at 3:19 pm

    “I was halves:
    yolk and pallor,
    brittle and sky,”

    Powerful, evocative.
    Thank you for this post.

    Reply
  3. Glynn says

    November 15, 2016 at 7:58 pm

    She uses arresting images. Thanks for the comment, Bethany!

    Reply
  4. Laura Lynn Brown says

    November 16, 2016 at 10:57 am

    That’s quite a cover, too.

    I keep going back to that stunning list of halves:

    An egg is divided
    into shell and meat. …

    I was halves:
    yolk and pallor,
    brittle and sky,
    blankness and savour,
    scoop and scorn,
    loft and huddle,
    core and cry;

    Not yolk and white. In this list we have objects, appearances, sound, sight, taste, action … How can each of these things be halves of a whole? But somehow they are.

    Thanks for the link you included for her, where I got to hear her read a poem aloud. And that site — you can pay 99 cents for a recording of a poet reading a poem, just like songs on iTunes! I wonder whether they sell well.

    Reply
    • Glynn says

      November 16, 2016 at 11:03 am

      Laura – I believe the web has done more for poetry in the last 20 years than probably anything else. Without it, we never would hear poets reading their poems in other parts of the world (among other things). Thanks for the comment.

      Reply

Trackbacks

  1. T.S. Eliot Prize: “Jackself” by Jacob Polley - says:
    February 28, 2017 at 5:00 am

    […] reading from The Seasons of Cullen Church. Vahni Capildeo read from Measures of Expatriation (reviewed here at Tweetspeak Poetry last November; it won the Forward Prize). With the other eight, they represent some of the British […]

    Reply

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