Measures of Expatriation

Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection and Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize (2016). In Measures of Expatriation Vahni Capildeo's poems and prose-poems speak of the complex alienation of the expatriate, and address wider issues around identity in contemporary Western society. Born in Trinidad and resident in the UK, Capildeo rejects the easy depiction of a person as a neat, coherent whole - 'pure is a strange word' - embracing instead a pointilliste self, one grounded in complexity. In these texts sense and syntax are disrupted; languages rub and intersect; dream sequences, love poems, polylogues and borrowed words build into a precarious self-assemblage. 'Cliché', she writes, 'is spitting into the sea', and in this book poetry is still a place where words and names, with their power to bewitch and subjugate, may be disrupted, reclaimed. The politics of the body, and cultures of sexual objectification, gender inequality and casual racism, are the borders across which Capildeo homes, seeking the modest luxury of being 'looked at as if one is neutral ground'. In the end it is language itself, the determination to speak, to which the poet finds she belongs: 'Language is my home, I say; not one particular language.' Measures of Expatriation is in the vanguard of literature arising from the aftermath of Empire, with a fearless and natural complexity.

Vahni Capildeo was born and educated in Trinidad and holds a DPhil in Old Norse from Christ Church, Oxford. Landscape, language and memory inform her poetry and prose, notably those of Caribbean, Indian diaspora, Icelandic, Scottish and Northern cultures. She has worked in academia; for the Commonwealth Foundation; at the Oxford English Dictionary; and as a volunteer with Oxfam and Rape Crisis. As Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow 2014 at the University of Cambridge, she developed approaches to poetry through collaborative and immersive events. The Harper-Wood Studentship (2015) at St John's College, Cambridge, will see her exploring similar collaborations abroad.