Vahni Capildeo's Venus as a Bear Reviewed

Over the weekend, The Guardian's David Wheatley reviewed Vahni Capildeo's latest collection of poetry, Venus as a Bear, out this year from Carcanet. Wheatley writes: "Many poets of the natural world have turned away from Romantic anthropomorphism, but the idea of an art truly scoured clean of our human projections is no less tricky." He goes on to open the review by considering "[a] good place to find bears in Roman Britain" and illuminates Capildeo's nod to Björk in the book's title. We'll just have to start there:

A good place to find bears in Roman Britain would have been north of the Antonine Wall, the subject of a poem in Vahni Capildeo’s Venus as a Bear. “I want you like I want a wall / I want you in bits”, we read in “Romano-Celtic Contact in the Antonine Display, Hunterian Museum, Glasgow”, though the “bits” here refer to archaeological remains rather than the aftermath of a human-ursine encounter. As the author of the outstanding Measures of Expatriation, winner of the 2016 Forward prize, Capildeo has already given evidence of her border-crossing imagination, and in Venus as a Bear she expands her cross-cultural investigations into the natural world.

Björk fans will catch the allusion in the title to “Venus as a Boy’” and in “Björk/Birch Tree” Capildeo celebrates creaturely transformations: “Lady into swan, come down; swan into sea, / set down; fire from the sea, set out; reach; launch.” As a genre, the bestiary has appealed to poets from Guillaume Apollinaire to DH Lawrence to Donika Kelly, with the interest lying as much in its classificatory challenge as in the animals themselves. “What is the term / for the gathering of one falcon?”, asks “Day, with Hawk”, while “The Last Night, a Nightingale” worries that our interest in them may not be such good news for the animals (“Whoever drew you also caged you”).

“Another armored animal,” exclaimed that most famous laureate of the beasts, Marianne Moore, in “The Pangolin”. Moore’s zoomorphic fantasias are frequently couched in imagery of armour and elusiveness, and the variable forms and torsive syntax of Capildeo’s work perform comparable acts of self-estrangement. Like many poems here, “Brant Geese” tugs language in the direction of the inhuman, and relishes the onomatopoeic results: “open a bubble of babble / swagger and swallow a vowel / turd it turn it shine it slime it”.

Much more to discover today at The Guardian.