Like a Tree, Walking

by Vahni Capildeo

Shortlisted for the 2022 Jhalak Prize. The Poetry Book Society Winter Choice 2021. Vahni Capildeo's Like a Tree, Walking is a fresh departure, even for this famously innovative poet. Taking its title from a story of sight miraculously regained, this book draws on Capildeo's interest in ecopoetics and silence. Many pieces originate in specific places, from nocturnes and lullabies in hilly Port of Spain to 'stillness exercises' recording microenvironments – emotional and aural – around English trees. These journeys offer a configuration of the political that makes a space for new kinds of address, declaration and relation. Capildeo takes guidance from vernacular traditions of sensitivity ranging from Thomas A Clark and Iain Crichton Smith to the participants in a Leeds libraries project on the Windrush. Like a Tree, Walking is finally a book defined by how it writes love.

Genres: Poetry, 21st Century

104 pages, Paperback

First published November 25, 2021

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Capildeo is a nonbinary Trinidadian Scottish poet and the current University of York writer in residence. Their fourth collection is richly studded with imagery of the natural world, especially birds and trees. “In Praise of Birds” makes a gorgeous start:

“In praise of high-contrast birds, purple bougainvillea thicketing the golden oriole. … In praise of grackles quarrelling on the lawn. / In praise of unbeautiful birds abounding in Old Norse, language of scavenging ravens, thought and memory, a treacherous duo”

and finds a late echo in “In Praise of Trees”: “If I could have translated piano practice into botany, the lichen is that Mozart phrase my left hand trialled endlessly.”

The title section (named after a moment from the book of Mark) draws on several numbered series – “Walk #2,” “Nocturne #1,” “Lullaby 4,” and so on – that appeared in a pamphlet they published last year. These are not uncomplicated idylls, though. Walks might involve dull scenery and asthma-inducing dust, as well as danger: “If nobody has abducted you, I’ll double back to meet you. … Before raper-man corner and the gingerbread house.” Lullabies wish for good sleep despite lawnmowers and a neighbour shooting his guns. There’s more bold defiance of expectations in phrases like “This is the circus for dead horses only”.

Language is a key theme, with translations from the French of Eugène Ionesco, and of Pierre de Ronsard into Trini patois. There are also dual-language erasure poems after Dame Julian of Norwich (Middle English) and Simone Weil (French). Much of the work is based on engagement with literature, or was written in collaboration with performers.

“Death is a thief in a stationery shop. He strolls out. The shopkeeper, a poor man, runs after, shouting. – I saw you! Give that back! – Give back what? Death says, strolling out. Hermes is a tram attendant who holds your coffee, helping you find the coin you dropped; it rolls underfoot.” (from “Odyssey Response”)

“Windrush Reflections” impresses for its research into the situation of Caribbean immigrants to Britain. It’s one of a number of long, multipart pieces, some of them prose poems. The verse relies mostly on alliteration and anaphora for its sonic qualities. Along with history, there is reflection on current events, as in “Plague Poems.” Experiences of casual racism fuel one of my favourite passages:

“the doorbell was ringing / the downstairs american oxford neighbours / wanted to check / by chatting on the intercom / if i was doing terrorism / i was doing transcriptions” (from “Violent Triage”)

A powerful collection, alive to the present moment and revelling in language and in flora and fauna. This is on the Jhalak Prize shortlist, which was announced yesterday.

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[Areeb Ahmad (Bankrupt_Bookworm) · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Why did I make you wait so long?
Death is a passing state
Night comes late
The nature of a day is long

Strange angers come along
The street breathes us, we breathe the street
Why did I make you wait so long?
Death is a passing state

Sweet whispering
The street wears us, we wear the street
Too living to be late
Too dying to belong
Why did I make you wait so long?"

// Lullaby # 7


Capildeo might say that "I am / without those things they say a poem needs" yet the poems in this collection have rich inner worlds that are set decidedly against established conventions in the best ways possible. The Erasure poems, a lot of them alternative readings of other texts, are a great example where language seems to break down into its shortest unit yet it makes a multitude of meanings suddenly accessible to the reader. The Walk, Nocturne, and Lullaby series of poems also showcase a breathtaking range of imagination and linguistic dexterity.

While these poems touch upon the pandemic, there is still a lot of joy here, a viable space for playfulness and fun. Trees are a regular motif of course: "Leaf it. Just leaf it. Spring green as a crayon drawing on the curb." I will admit here that I am generally not a fan of long, rambling poems as they are rarely not verbose and that was the case with Capildeo too. In general, it's solid even though not totally aligned with my tastes. Capildeo exhorts: "Words, take wing, fly commonly among all people / who share vulnerability on a trembling earth; / who drink, or hope to drink, sweetly, cool water."



(I received a finished copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.)

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

The erasure poems in this collection are magical.

[Shivanee Ramlochan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anthony Vahni Capildeo takes us into the wild weald, the poui's fruiting heart, the enormous green of the life just at our backs: each poem asks only that we face it, and in the sylvan doing, look at ourselves with love.

Walks around the Queen's Park Savannah, seals who sound like ghosts, bougainvillea beatitudes blossoming over the ghosts of old tramlines, the multiple creatures that cavort on the moon: Capildeo makes room for all of this, or reveals that such space -- for the liminal, the transcorporeal, the world of birdsong as fundamental sonic truth -- has always existed. Reminding us that we can exist here, too. That we are made for a world we can barely comprehend, but it comprehends us, is here for us, can reveal us to ourselves: multiple, strange, squawking and sprouting new growth.

These poems are hope emissaries and hubris-decriers, anti-legislative jumbifications of the spirit, douen devotions that attend to the form between the forest and the cemetery, and believe me, you want them. Let them live in your spine as doves. Drink them like coconut water good for your daughter. Let them bioluminesce, the better to show you what all our age's darkness is worth.

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will confess that Capildeo's previous collection Skin Can Hold was formally intimidating to me (though it seems time to return), but I found this work endlessly exciting and engaging. The rhythms in particular invite and reward reading out loud. I've been listening to Capildeo themself reading some of these poems and it's even more dramatic and intense. These pieces stretch, literally at times, across the ocean from Trinidad to the UK, exploring the legacies of colonialism, migration and life during the pandemic with a strong eco-political sense of awareness.
A longer review will come.

[Rhodri Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't think I understood most of these. That's not necessarily a criticism.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

A really exquisite collection - Vahni what balance I am quite taken.
I take a cue - in praise of men who shut up

[Margaryta · Rating 3 out of 5]

I remember loving Venus as a Bear, but I struggled with Like a Tree, Walking. The collection is quite stylistically diverse and some of the poems landed better. The longer poems were more difficult to grasp, especially towards the end. I loved the shorter pieces, like the opening "In Praise of Birds", which was closer to what I thought this collection would be. I'll revisit this one in the future, maybe a different mindset would help.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn’t understand what these poems were doing but some of the language/patterns/sentence structure/shapes were more than enough to make me revisit (and stare in the first instance). I liked how some are in conversation with other poets and some are entirely original.

[Zoë Siobhan Baillie · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5, rounded up because honestly I do not know enough about poetry to be able to engage in a meaningful way with a lot of this book which is not the author's fault. There were a fair few pieces that really resonated with me, and the whole book was really challenging, and I have no regrets.

[Peter Vegel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I appreciate the creativity in this piece of writing (although I feel it would have been nice to pay more hommage to Van Ostaijen in some of the experimental poems), but most poems lost me as, to my eye, they were too much about trying to reinvent the wheel instead of conveying feeling and wonder.

[Helen McClory]

I tend to think that collections exist for poets to try their best to reach for those moments (maybe sometimes even whole poems) that elevate the world, give us a mental gasp - this one has a few of those. won't say which ones, as that's for you, dear reader.

[Inverted · Rating 2 out of 5]

Probably not the right audience for this. In Praise of Birds was a nice start, but couldn't sink my teeth into anything else.

[Rhiannon Grant · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deep, sometimes surreal, often evocative poems, with a particularly good series using observations and connotations of street trees.

[Kristiana · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. Most of it was too abstract for me and I really didn’t like the erasure poetry. But, Odyssey Response is superb.