Day, With Hawk

by Vahni Capildeo

for K.M. Grant

Here among witch-hazels I miss
the peregrine we met just once.
Like the fire from bare twigs that twists
a floral kiss on winter’s neck,
He stunned me so I’m hanging on
to language by its clichés, pushed
to singer-songwrite fingernails
down a tumbling slate precipice.
I would call Him chestnut-stippled,
light on the arm, I want to say,
the non-urgent flexing of chest
muscles making a snow-champion’s
balance; and bad old hierarchy
doffs its executioner’s garb
to rise with the word, princely. Love,
this is; no poem. What is the term
for the gathering of one falcon?
An embarrassment of poets.
An adoration. An abyss.

From Venus as a Bear. Reproduced with kind permission of Carcanet.

Forward Prizes for Poetry

Shortlisted for Best Collection 2018

Venus as a Bear

Vahni Capildeo

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About Vahni Capildeo

Vahni Capildeo (b.1973, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago) won the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2016 with Measures of Expatriation. Asked about future projects in a subsequent interview, Capildeo spoke of writing ‘thing-like poems which did not belong in any of the recent books: moss, glass, lizard words’. Some of these have found their way into Venus as a Bear, a collection that explores the strange affinities humans have for creatures, objects and places.

Capildeo’s poetry deliberately resists purely biographical interpretation: the author elects to be identified as ‘they/them’ in the context of their work. They came to the UK in 1991 to study Old Norse at Christ Church in Oxford, and to work for the Oxford English Dictionary. Their advice for anyone starting out in poetry today is simple: ‘Delete Facebook. Go outdoors’.

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