Slow I know, but I have just caught up with the fact that a Trinidadian poet, Vahni Capildeo, won last year’s Forward Prize for Poetry for best collection.
This, from a Guardian article, is what the chair of judges said:
Capildeo’s collection [is] “a book you will forever be opening”.
“She is trying to articulate something quite hard to pin down and isn’t afraid to boldly take risks in language and layout,” Booker said. “It is a book that no one else could have written; it is her DNA, her stamp. Every time you open that book, you’ll find something peculiar, something exhilarating, something new, something exquisitely crafted.”
“[Measures of Expatriation] is almost like a swan – calm on top of the water, and underneath it is pedalling furiously, to create a new vocabulary in terms of the layout and language used, the lexicon it uses.”
One of the commenters underneath the article linked to this lovely short of Vahni reading three of her poems.