Myriad Minded

Vahni Capildeo is prolific—a new pamphlet, Odyssey Calling, falls unfortunately outside the purview of this essay—and poets so restlessly generative are often animated by a nexus of idea-feelings they return to and augment.  Skin Can Hold melds verse (open-form, closed, vernacular, a rondeau, a “sextina”) and prose (essayistic, narrative cento, stage directions for performance) inspired by medieval polyphony, Oulipo, and Muriel Spark, with a moment comparing the Guyanese poet-activist Martin Carter to Gerard Manley Hopkins. (Carter’s “Sensibility and the Search” mentions Hopkins alongside Dylan Thomas, Edgar Allan Poe, and the French Symbolists, distinguishing from the crapulous mimicry of colonial verse a transnational “family spirit—a kinship—not a relationship between master and slave.”) Capildeo’s writing (poetry and criticism) transforms into perpetual mental incandescence that which the world’s cold eye might otherwise stigmatize—a form of erasure—as impressionism, eccentricity, hypertrophied outrage. Challenging an Anglo-American verse culture in which, increasingly, people of color have a place, but on the terms of a white commentariat with no language adequate to work both “politically engaged and aesthetically-driven” (as Capildeo writes of Carter’s work), this is poetry which enters phenomenologically, with heartbreaking and case-making fidelity, into racial travails. What it’s like, for instance, to have someone look at but not really see you; to nod at your words, and spuriously respond, but without hearing what you wish to express. Capildeo also articulates the deep, sometimes self-attacking sadness that comes of seeking, following such encounters, an impossible justice:

Oppression and prejudice are quasi-poetic, pseudo-artful, in their ability to morph, appearing in official bodies, or unthinking social practices; in popular fictions or institutional architecture careless of blood history, or within the convolution of one hateful or self-hating mind.

One’s face is perceived as always-already a scandal, a hurdle to be cleared or a pitfall to be avoided—through ignoring, or silencing, or drowning out—or, alternatively, an opportunity the white person egotistically seizes, to announce themselves to themselves, and others, as not-racist; an invitation to pretend their burgeoning self-pity is of its nature progressive.

Consider, in Skin Can Hold, the flayed woman in “Four Ablutions”: “you are ignored by him and knowable to any others as vulnerability in situ, a heap of lines that cannot be crossed out, except deletion by delivery is what his voice does.” In “Shame,” a performer wears a “coat of mirrors,” a “Venetian wire mask,” and (visibility, the right and wrong kind, is of the essence) “glow in the dark paint”:

I have no shame but fury

I have no shame but weariness

I have no shame but a sense of enclosure

I have no shame but a sense of déjà vu

I have no shame but the knowledge I shall be disbelieved.

To be a woman of color is to be erased twice over. Yet Capildeo’s sympathy extends, as George Eliot would have it, beyond their own lot—into the experience of Jewish people, for instance. A reimagining of Shylock’s famous speech (which he isn’t permitted to even begin) riffs on Clare Quilty’s elastic mishearings of Humbert Humbert in Lolita:

Shylock:      Hath ...
Person A:    It is much too hot for June.
Shylock:      Hath not ...
Person B:    When are you having your holiday?
Shylock:      Hath not a ...
Person A:     I was booked for Sharm Al Sheikh. I love the sea.
                    They’ve ruined it.
Person B:     You were looking forward ...
Person A:     Now I’m afraid to fly.
Person B:     ...to that.
Shylock:      Hath not a ...
Person B:     It’s the man with the gold chain again.
Shylock:      Eyes! Hands! Organs!
Person A:     Ignore him.
—From Radical Shakespeare

“They’ve ruined it.” In times of resurgent anti-Semitism, Shylock’s voice matters—but that “gold chain” also suggests (as often in Capildeo) cross-identifications and solidarities. In Capildeo’s debut, No Traveller Returns, Hindu marriage-wear tropes what we try and fail to get across (in two senses): “What I would say is dripping and knotting, like a gold chain neglected/so the flow of its links sets to fighting and mating.” They don’t gloss this object, “a thing not for wearing nor for discarding,/to shine light no longer, absorbed in a box,” for readers who don’t know that culture; nor (sticking with No Traveller Returns) does the speaker of “Amulet” deign to elucidate her finery.

“That’s an unusual pendant you are wearing.”
“Yes, it is rather unusual.”
“May I look at it?”
“There is really nothing to see.”
“Was it a gift?”
“It is something I chose for myself.”
“Do you wear it often?”
“Not all the time.”
“Why not? It suits you. Don’t you like it?”
“Yes, it is one of those things which you need to feel complete.”

Let’s collate that poem with one from Capildeo’s 2018 collection, Venus as a Bear:

There is, too, the amulet
prayed over in front of a thousand-name-chanted fire
by another dead one;
it was like poking my eye or bruising my clit
when the airport guard stared me down
and fingered it as if to pretend
it might be a poison capsule or travestied / radical souvenir bullet,
I felt it hold up my nerves when she grabbed the gold cylinder,
the metal hung in air
clasped externally
yet more internal to me.
So take it off is not an option. Without trying, thinking feelingly,
I am not speaking of or as myself or for any / one.
Damn the subtle body’s extension into material, affectively.
—From Crossing Borders: Assuming the Habits of the Day and Night

The person of color is under no obligation to annotate their marginality—to explain themselves—it can be a pleasure to do so, but not when harangued. (This includes the demands of poetry publishers, prize committees, academics, reviewers, and readers.) Rejecting the signifier “pendant,” the speaker of “Amulet” withstands the exoticizing gaze which eye-gropes without shame. The power dynamic sharpens in “Crossing Borders,” with an experience familiar to those of us routinely delayed at checkpoints—I can’t think of another poet who writes so “feelingly” about this, except Seamus Heaney (a Catholic in Northern Ireland, stopped at a roadblock, a sten gun in his face). He speaks of “the tightness and the nilness” of that contretemps—Capildeo lambasts the guard’s preening exactitude. The rituals—disguising a vast impotence—of airport security compare poorly with those immemorially enacted around a “thousand-name-chanted fire.”

“I try,” writes Capildeo, “to create changes of modality in one book,” which means these collections ask to be listened to as wholes, rather like concept albums (Venus as a Bear plays on Bjork’s Venus as a Boy). But to others, a “shifting of modes, which initially seemed natural, was not universally obvious.... Identity politics; the lyrical I; were inadequate to a sense of self evolving from others and their words, accessible or arcane.” (Hence the poet’s pronoun, “they.”) Nettled by these poems, thrust back into painful experiences of my own, I return to a beautiful sentence from Christopher Ricks’s Keats and Embarrassment: “the deepest feelings are somehow involuntary and yet are our responsibility.” Reading Capildeo’s poems, one thinks: the raped woman, the exploited person of color, lesbians stared at on the train—these people may feel that not they, but others, are responsible for their deepest feelings. This is part of what it means, repeating Capildeo, to have “a sense of self evolving from others and their words.” But isn’t it a trap, to be positioned or self-position as wholly a victim—passively scorched by one’s ordeals? So we’d better reclaim those feelings, seeing ourselves as coauthors, while repudiating that mental-health ideology which would have us believe that we and we only have the power to make ourselves happy or unhappy. This is a denial of the political world, and Capildeo seems to me peculiarly attuned to the link between that world and the single encounter, and to how power self-reproduces through bureaucracies of affect. Skin Can Hold’s poem on the Douma Four—activists abducted in Syria—contains the line: “How does that make you feel?  ” The language of psychoanalysis drifts into normal conversation—but “make” reeks of compulsion. I’m reminded of the ambiguous power of that same word when it appears twice in one of Terrance Hayes’s sonnets: “As if being called Nigger never makes you/Disappear. As if the fear of other people/Never makes you levitate.” We are constructed, made, into the people we are by the words and actions of those around us; “fear” may derive from internalized coercion, as well as the awareness that we don’t have—as mindfulness advocates insist—total power over our thoughts, but can, in unequal societies, be made to feel things we don’t want to.

The US reader may think, reading this essay, of Claudia Rankine. Capildeo discusses in PN Review what Rankine “seeks to convey about the predicament of the non-‘white’-skinned individual whose daily life cannot be individual, cannot be pure and spontaneous—cannot be lyric—in so far as it is subject to the encasements and flayings,” that metaphor again, “of racialized perception.” “In line at the drugstore,” writes Rankine, “it’s finally your turn, and then it’s not as he walks in front of you and puts his things on the counter. The cashier says, Sir, she was next. When he turns to you he is truly surprised”; and Capildeo—

The crystalline aggregation of “microaggressions” in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, like a lump of geological fact, fits no human palm without spiking it somewhere. Analysis, witness, lament: the book is seamed with these modes, not composed of any one of them. It amasses its material and shifts points of view without offering settlement....

Rankine’s “then” and “When” slide in like acupuncturist’s needles. At the first turn, “you” has, you have not been assigned a gender, race or age; nor has the cashier. The microaggression, or pushiness, comes from a “he.” The cashier exercises the power to strike the as-yet unfigured “you” into a “she,” a female who is spoken about protectively after a mild outrage has been committed against her. “You,” you, have no option but to remain silent. The poem gives no option except witnessing silence. The poem, as an act of language, ruptures that silence, but you, “you,” languish in the drama of passivity, petrified by outrage. Citizen’s pronouns are not objects of excavation so much as mini-gorgons. They can turn the reader to stone.

Capildeo not only tends to Rankine’s much-discussed pronouns, but also the duration and sequencing of her sentences. “The drama of passivity,” of being “petrified by outrage,” diagrams our cultural moment; gorgons are gendered, and in Measures of Expatriation—their breakout book of 2016—Capildeo explains that “Medusa’s head was co-opted as a weapon, to be brought out of the man’s bag when enemies needed to be stopped.” Turning-to-stone revives the geological metaphor, where “settlement,” in the context of reparations, has two meanings, positioning Rankine’s text as position-shifting, while acclaiming the rebarbativeness with which she leaves unresolved her dealings with her audience. The needles of an acupuncturist are inserted at cardinal points not to injure but to give relief. Capildeo suggests Rankine’s power both to disturb and to provide a mode of imaginative remedy: this is criticism alive to work that is both “politically-engaged and aesthetically-driven.”

I’ve lingered with Capildeo’s criticism for two reasons: first, because it can be challenging, and in the end needless, to sift it from the prose in the books of poetry; and second, because its perspective on race pulverizes clichés. Returning to “Crossing Borders”—“damn” is ambiguous: it could be a directive to the reader, or from the speaker of the poem to themselves, to repel emplacement. As “thinking feelingly” contravenes a bad “trying,” whose voice is it that protests: “I am not speaking of or as myself or for any/one”? Speaking directly on BBC radio’s Start the Week, Capildeo damns those restrictions which prevail:

When I was growing up I had the idea that the poet or a poet could be a channel for all languages, for any sort of linguistic phenomenon that any literary work encountered, and then when I came to England I found that marketing and identity politics were combining to crush, like in the Star Wars trash compactor, the body, the voice, the voice on the page, the biography, the history ... You had to choose, you had to be a sort of documentary witness wheeled around and exposing your wounds in the marketplace.

Measures of Expatriation, which won the Forward Prize in 2016 and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, pokes fun at racialized clichés: “I opened a book and a mango fell out. I opened another, and another mango fell out.... Woman doth not live by mango alone.” Capildeo complicates those narratives of identity, migration, of self-loss or a self found, which are everywhere and get us, increasingly, nowhere.

Speaking of Eliot, that dead, white anti-Semite (and immortal genius), Capildeo engages deeply with his work, both in the later books, including Skin Can Hold—“The end of the poem/The end of the poem happened before/The end of the poem happened before it/The end of the poem happened before it began”—and earlier on. No Traveller Returns echoes his phraseology (“Death is the fall of water”), with a note on Dhumavati—“one of the Mahavidyas, aspects of the Hindu understanding of the Absolute as Goddess. She is portrayed as a widow, usually old, ugly, inauspicious, and highly dangerous”—resembling his addenda to The Waste Land. It’s about reclaiming the Eastern wisdom which he appropriates, while taking marginal cultures as an imaginative and conceptual base, just as he presumes the anteriority of Anglo-European texts. Take “Inscription (Windward Isles)”:

By the light that the absorbed Rastafarian carver
said to put inside the calabash lantern
so the pattern comes out
animal, vegetable, abstract,
the twenty questions of this habitat
incised by his mineral edge, to his mind,

I will name them as if you know them,
name locales as if you ought to know them.

“I will show you fear in a handful of dust”: the male poet’s vatic imperiousness (I think of Derek Walcott, as well as Eliot) is summoned and discarded—“Except that Fort James brings out the suicide in me.” When daffodils turn up, they aren’t the inspiriting mental possession they were for Wordsworth:

       out in the border, some
drooping already, they get
blowzy so quickly, their scent’s
pale & powdery.
       They remind me
of something I wanted—or
something I want to forget.
—From And Again

The book’s prose poems on hybrid monsters recall Carter once again, who in 1974 discovered in axolotls a trope for postcolonial consciousness. He writes with weary humor, having served in Guyana’s first independent government and resigned in frustration after just three years:

I believe we are somewhat like axolotls, which is to say that, for some reason or other, something seems to have gone awry with that process of metamorphosis, which, if we are to accept what our leaders tell us, should work to transform us from what we function as—an aggregation of begging, tricking, bluffing, cheating subsistence seekers and assorted hustlers—into a free community of valid persons.

The jokey-earnest tone of the mock-biologist is there in Capildeo also, though another parallel would be with poems, also in prose, by Matthea Harvey and Anne Boyer. These works stage an uncertain, impure, put-upon consciousness which—as Jeremy Noel-Tod writes of Capildeo—“carefully avoids committing itself to unambiguous markers of race and gender,” yet invites group identifications: “Monsters have a beaten place inside them. Not ‘beaten’ as in ‘defeated.’ Beaten: lacerated, trembling, unbelieving, angry, proud, humiliated. Unable to move out of its own rawness, like a sore or like a song, it weeps.... It is dangerous to consort with Monsters.” Like Boyer, in her “At Least Two Kinds of People,” Capildeo unseats the reader racing to identify with the victim and not the oppressor: “Consider your own motives. Are you, by nature, a Monster hunter?”

Capildeo attacks in literary culture prejudices which we prefer to locate outside our coterie, rather than confront on our doorstep. The same people, for instance, who leap to disapprove of impoverished communities that feel immigrants are invading their patch, will complain when their territory is encroached upon—when, that is, a poet of color achieves publication or is nominated for an award. (Yes, we’re here to take your jobs—and your prize money.) In the UK, minorities are only beginning to rise to positions of editorial or academic authority, yet tensions are already apparent. In the 2005 pamphlet Person Animal Figure, Capildeo analyzes ressentiment from within, in a send-up of Molly Bloom’s voice from Ulysses—a woman’s run-on, unpunctuated talk, figured as an emotional flood: “Let me say that if I write transcriptions of life as it happens to me this is not out of nervousness I am sure I’m authentic.” As Paisley Rekdal revealed within William Logan’s review style, the jargon of authenticity continues to shape our responses to minority poets. This goes beyond poetry infighting, displaying in microcosm those forces of reaction which deform and degrade public life, and which have turned racism into the new normal. Capildeo enters into reactionary sentiments so we can know our enemy:

Being the person who stands up beneath the magazines I am the person who is angry with feminists for putting it into my head that people think the magazines have something to do with all women which means with women like me what a load of rubbish ask anyone right here right now they would all say no they would think you were mad nobody thinks about my body when I talk when I walk across the park at night with my shopping of course you can’t be afraid I’m sure I’m just as good as invisible perfectly safe

Self-protection hardens into conservatism: one accepts the status quo when the alternative would be to feel at risk. Rather than countenance the dangers of walking at night as a woman, the speaker makes a more manageable enemy out of the “feminists”—but they’ve still gotten to her; she fends off their insights by inventing a crowd on her side.

Capildeo’s working method is to try things out in a chapbook (giving a small publisher a fillip) which is then contained and transfigured—as, within the oyster, a pearl radiantly accretes around a speck of grit or plastic insert—in the next full collection. The poems of Person Animal Figure reappear in Undraining Sea (now sadly out of print), alongside another voice: concise, wisely saddened, epigrammatic—“The people who know how to hear are people who have/something to tell.” The sixteenth-century humanist Sannazarius provides a glowingly unexpected correlate for the poet sparring to evoke a landscape, or mindscape, which their reader finds alien; William Empson could discover (I’ll do my best) all seven types of ambiguity in the following—which is far more than skin-deep:

Skin is ziplocks, skin is feathers,
skin is over skin.

Skin is closed against the world, protective like a Ziploc bag; it’s biologically to-be-expected, like a bird’s feathers (which keep in warmth, and make possible flight, as in both escape and seasonal migration); skin is “over skin,” in that one thinness, or thickness, or shade of skin might hide beneath another, in peelable layers like those of an onion; or, this could be a carnal snapshot (A.R. Ammons’s “Their Sex Life”: “One failure on/Top of another”); or, a picture of racial hierarchy (white skin trumps the rest, lords it “over” the dark-skinned). Finally, for skin to be “over skin” means to be bored by it, tired, even if temporarily, of talking about it.

One gets trapped, that is, in both a subject-position and (as a poet) subject-matter, and the escape must be through style. The title of 2011’s Dark and Unaccustomed Words, from George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie, is about challenging received notions concerning good writing and bad—a chance for Capildeo to illuminate and investigate present-day taste-strictures. In PN Review, after a sentence on sexual violence, with four variations in it on the word “appropriate” (both pronunciations, both meanings), as well as two parentheses, the poet asks: “Did you find that difficult to read? Badly written? The quibbling, the repetitions, are deliberate.” I’ve consciously foregone the potted biography with which essay retrospectives ordinarily commence because poets of color, and women poets, can be imprisoned this way, within the identity-container. But 2013’s Utter features an unusually long author bio, the start of which may, belatedly, do the job, while outlining Capildeo’s own impatience:

Born in Port of Spain, Vahni Capildeo is the daughter of Leila Bissoondath Capildeo, who told her stories of East Trinidad, and the late Devendranath Capildeo, a poet. Capildeo’s other formative influences include Indian diaspora culture (notably a preoccupation with boundaries between the human and the natural), French, and pre-1500 English literature. Capildeo read English Language and Literature at Christ Church, Oxford. Her awards ... reflect the intensity, variety and adventure of reading encouraged by the tutorial system. Shortly before her final examinations, she was struck by a speeding police car. During her convalescence, she could not read. At this time, she formed the friendship with medieval musicologist Emma Dillon which led to an enduring interest in the musical possibilities of poetry and prose.

This satire recalls Veronica Forrest Thomson’s “An Impersonal Statement”—testing the Oxbridge stuff against the experiences of women writing, and living, experimentally. But it’s worth noting that the poet of color educated at Oxbridge will have the facts of their education fired at them. Face-to-face, and in reviews, and with sneering tweets. As if one claimed, not being white, a sort of exalted victimhood simply by existing, and which one’s degree classifications contradict. This only continues the indignities one remembers, of being the wrong color at these white institutions, and succeeding despite racism. So it’s brave for Capildeo to not play by the rules, and explain, however tongue-in-cheek, that the tutorial system, and a doctorate in Old Norse, has shaped the work.

Utter pools surrealistic zeal—“The cows discovered in the theatre wear/an abject or an absent-minded air./.../... For whom/theatre, if not for cows?”—with references to the canon: “Moderate tea-drinker. ‘Water with berries in’t’?” The allusion is to The Tempest, and the drink Caliban receives from Prospero, which may be alcoholic, or a potion to make him biddable. A figure of postcolonial resistance, he changes role when Capildeo mentions tea, which English people drink in vast quantities, and which continues to be grown on what were once colonial plantations (“moderate,” too, plays on centrism—there’s a politically-uninvolved someone here, sipping tea in his parlor, unconcerned with where it comes from or what he might see should he deign to, Shiva forbid, look out the window). Prose poems eviscerate the Woolfian “La Poetessa”—“English her name, English her language, English her absobloomsburylutely witty garments”; Sandeep Parmar close-reads this poem in Prac Crit—and “The Critic in His Natural Habitat,” a figure who does seem to me a depressingly Oxbridge institution. His voice:

A poet like you could bring a fresh perspective to criticism. People would appreciate that. You needn’t worry: they wouldn’t expect scholarship.... You don’t write for The Times Literary Supplement, do you? Dorina recently did a brilliant review of Tricia’s edition of Gussie’s translations of Brazilian slum poetry composed in Spanish by a French guy who taught on an art history course here, oh, 
donkeys’ years ago.

I’ve met this person before: I wish I hadn’t.

With Measures of Expatriation, Capildeo moved to Carcanet, and a wider readership—but its transnational emphasis, prosimetric myriad-mindedness, dueling subject-positions (“men singing about Pakis ... change their singing to a theme of detailed lust ... One of the neighbours must be the woman: I have become the Paki”), wordplay (“I walk about two rooms in spills of exaltation, making no cents”), and counter-accusations (“the staring heterosexuals disembark,/having stared, openly”) all build on what came before. “I know your ancestors without researching them,” boasts one voice, while another materializes of diasporic experience:

“My child.”

The bearded man in the ticket office is calling hardback old women his children. Like the immemorial conversation-killer that Trinidadian parents transmit to their migrant, errant offspring via the newest technologies:

“But you are my child. I can say anything to you. And I can take anything from you. You can say anything to me.”

The act of containment (the foreign parent, trying to cancel distance, to tell both themselves and the child that their relationship is permanent and unchanging) has its bad double in the pressure on the migrant to label and package themselves, a pressure the more pernicious because one’s own self-feeling, as an “unreal citizen” (I think, and Capildeo may be too, of Eliot again, listing ruined cities and ending “Unreal”) suggests the opposite. “Imagine a pointilliste vision given an order of dismissal: the dots of color that vibrate until the eye interlinks them and learns the trick of making sense of the person or the landscape depicted ... Being looked at, I was that unmade image.”

But the book also has its clear scenes, landscapes, and people—thingy quiddities that won’t cede to intellection their leaping concreteness. “The yellow poui is flowering. That means rain. Will that be enough to put out the bush fires on the hills?”; “My voice reverted to a kind of Trinidadian that it had never used in Trinidad: a birdlike screech that would carry over a wrought metal gate (painted orange) across a yard with frizzle fowls and the odd goat.”

Janaki is tall. When she opened the wardrobe and I saw the array of clothes, it seemed right. There is stateliness in her modesty. The formal garments glistering there matched her presence almost weight for weight. She is pure gold.

A statue, moving: does that call up a nightmare scene? Why? A statue, moving: can that instill a sense of peace? It is, is so. Each gesture it makes should be made with consideration: otherwise it risks breaking itself or crushing that which it would reach or touch. Respecting its own range of possible movements, it would respect your space. If it made an approach, it could never be appropriate. It could only approximate you, so wearily, as only stone can be weary, for its way of breathing is to lose itself: each micropore exhales dust in a tiny brightening of the air, and with each exhalation the stone is less.

I read today of the man in his early forties pierced to death by metal as he dismantled a bridge under government orders.

There are inevitabilities that need not have become inevitable had there been the difference made by thought.
—From Too Solid Flesh

Women and stone, again. Pygmalion sculpted his Galatea; in the Renaissance, the metaphor was everywhere—The Winter’s Tale sees the statue of Hermione come to life; in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, Olympia “anoints her throat” with an alchemized substance which gives it “the essential form of marble stone” (Sharon Stone, in the dire Catwoman film, repeats this with her evilly-concocted moisturizer). The Victorian poet Christina Rossetti masters the metaphor—“Laura turned cold as stone/To find her sister heard that cry alone”; “I have no wit, no words, no tears;/My heart within me like a stone”; “White and golden Lizzie stood,/Like a lily in a flood,—/Like a rock of blue-veined stone.” Mrs. Dalloway’s daughter, in Virginia Woolf’s novel, thrill-rides through London by bus, looking ahead “with the staring incredible innocence of sculpture.” (Capildeo also praises in Measures Dante’s “stony poems.”) If men, looking at women, turn them into objects to be contemplated, then the metaphor also suggests a fortified interiority, a secret life within the woman of stone, which she defends against the world.

As Janaki’s “stateliness” gives way, then, to that of a “statue,” we should keep literary history in mind; Capildeo’s timed sensuous prose—“each micropore exhales dust in a tiny brightening of the air”—resubscribes to the monster metaphor but with a new allusiveness. Paragraph breaks scene-switch, from a woman, to statues, to a man who hasn’t turned to stone but was killed working with it. The final sentence-paragraph is withering, a dry remark (that is one function of its elegance) but its wording also opposes to fate the ability of thought to intervene in history. These fragile statue-beings, and their neighbors, become responsible in the moment—the advent of difference creates, in conversations, in communities, the need for humane improvisation—for how they behave toward each other. A social ethic: if we could admire others without objectifying them, then disposable labor would become correspondingly unthinkable. “Pierced to death by metal,” in its estranged phrasing, allows the unnamed man a claim on our fast-roaming attention, but also sounds like a method of execution.

As Capildeo grows better known, the work—moving now to 2018, and Venus as a Bear—has become more approachable, though never cozy: poems about animals and landscapes tease a mainstream decodability. But “Crossing Borders,” as I’ve mentioned, comes from this book, and Capildeo’s willful heterogeneousness, a refusal to be evenly opaque or through-shine, or for poem to poem to be spoken by the same kind of voice, is a strength. Each collection performs a life-giving dissensus. It’s another form of code-switching or self-alienation, between the roles of experimenter and lyricist, which means the reader also has to become double, or triple, multifarious, able to enter into and live alternatives without taking refuge in one idea of rebellion or conformity: “Any book is a gift,/bringing time; with no time to read it,/the reader has time, unreading the book,/time implicated in its binding, its petals.” The angle of attack is always unexpected, as in the sonnet “The Pets of Others” (whose title tousles the expected phrase, “the lives of others”):

Turtle thrashes opposite the dishwasher,
climbs the water breakline, while the rocks
wait artificially; what sand is needed
being supposable only from flippers
in action, while the chin lifts; she meets the eyes
of tall and dry onlookers. Her red streaks seem
so powerful, a punishable woman’s!
Yet compassion flows pointlessly towards her,
like a sable marram dune shifting to make valleys
in which some find rest, from which the sea cannot be glimpsed,
or a way out predicted. Her eggs will come
unfertilised, after how much compulsive
thrashing; and she will be saved from eating them
by her warm-handed keepers, who’d love her wild.

Animals get into poems a whiff of elemental risk (that is, we could say, what they’re for; as naked women play their role in men’s paintings), licensing a devil-may-care sensuousness which, regretting our exile from the animal world, tries to override this division. So this poem’s remarkable for not being about D.H. Lawrence’s wild thing, that isn’t and could never be, sorry for itself, and for instead evoking a pet amid artificial rocks, a turtle whose “red streaks” suggest a scarlet woman (the letter A stitched on Hester Prynne’s dress), trapped for others to gawk at. The language isn’t free-flowing but contemplative, with its two semicolons in the octave.

“Yet compassion flows pointlessly towards her”: we feel for animals, though they may not understand, and though our goodwill can become cruelly displaced, in this way, from human beings perceived, unlike a passively suffering turtle, as a threat. (The cat-loving old woman in Nissim Ezekiel’s “The Old Woman,” living on “cornflakes, hate and sweetened milk”; or the misanthropic philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer—“one has the impression,” writes Darian Leader, who might be talking about poetry reviewers again, “that closeness for this man was ruled out by the exigency to obliterate anyone else who might be king”—announcing he’d rather not live “if dogs did not exist.”) Pets are possessions, so does our love for them exceed self-interest? The dune metaphor is metaphysical, in taking us from the turtle, through the shaping of a response, toward an unnamed desert people to whom—one might argue—that compassion should properly flow, like water irrigating the lifeless sand, were it not that compassion, figured as a fount of involuntary feeling, cannot be directed, like water, along artificial canals; though perhaps the project both defended and derided as “political correctness” is an attempt at just this.

They say history is written by the winners. From book to book, Capildeo has tried to do something about that. Skin Can Hold contains the “Midnight Robber Monologue,” with its echoes of Othello—

When Columbus men landed holding their bright weapons up, I was waiting for them in the form of dew and rust. When the British and the Spanish and the French and the Dutch and the Yankees and the Portuguese took away your language, I grew strong eating your tongues.

The amoral energy of this “stranger invader” happens, like love, beyond good and evil, but originates in a specifically Guyanese poem by Martin Carter:

This is the dark time my love.
It is the season of oppression, dark metal, and tears.
It is the festival of guns, the carnival of misery.
Everywhere the faces of men are strained and anxious.

Who comes walking in the dark night time?
Whose boot of steel tramps down the slender grass?
It is the man of death, my love, the strange invader
Watching you sleep and aiming at your dream.

The political poet writes, with gravity and grace, of their own “dark time,” while saving something for posterity—a resonance which speaks to other woe than theirs, as well as to a happiness which may yet be collectively realized. Seasons come in cycles; “everywhere” shimmers—the word doesn’t seem to me sloppily universal, but vital to the contriving of a type of endurance it remains in the poet’s power to confer. It may be in this spirit that Capildeo writes, pretends to recover, a “Fragment of a Lost Epic from the Losing Side”:

The dust whispered and skittered under the feet
that audibly tried to make no noise.
The city waited
The army was on the move
The women listened from within the darkened windows
The city would never be so bright again.

A shape like crossed forearms held up to shelter the face
appeared in the metal of the sky.