Publisher's Synopsis
Vahni Capildeo's third collection, Dark and Unaccustomed Words, is the most lyrical and playful book in a three-part project exploring poetic form. The title is from George Puttenham's The Arte of Poesie (1589), where such words are not considered fit for 'Princes, nor great estates'. Capildeo seizes the freedom to roam in poems for friends, lovers, family members and fellow poets, which reach from 'the dark I know' into speech which is 'fearless, aurorean'.
"So much of the world has been rendered familiar by the industries of interpretation ... that it takes a genius to recover its real intransigence. It is like being brought up hard against an unmoveable rock amidst all the torrents of counterfeited poetry when you catch hold of any poem by Capildeo."
Rod Mengham
"Vahni Capildeo not only breaks down conventional notions of seeing the world, but re-affirms ideas of the value and worth of individual experiences. This work... underlines what matters above all: the fate of the free self. It is a subversive ocean of diamonds, rubies and bones, raging against limiting forces."
Andre Bagoo, for Newsday (Trinidad and Tobago)
"Crafted silver turning on faultless glass."
Brian Catling, on No Traveller Returns
"This is an urgent, shapely, generous and serious collection - of self-witness, astute, gentle, sharp and alive."
Adam Piette, on Undraining Sea
Vahni Capildeo was born in Trinidad in 1973, and has lived in the UK since 1991. After a Research Fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge, her sense of the living language was deepened forever by her time in the offices of the Oxford English Dictionary. She is currently a Contributing Editor of the Caribbean Review of Books. She is glad of an enduring connection with the North of England, following stints at the Universities of Sheffield and Leeds. Her poetry and prose has been widely anthologised, most recently in Identity Parade (Bloodaxe, 2010), In the Telling (Cinnamon, 2009), Trinidad Noir (2008), Ian Sinclair's London: City of Disappearances (Penguin, 2007) and The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse (2005). She lives in Oxford.
