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Brotherton Poetry Prize Anthology II
Edited by Simon Armitage, Malika Booker, Melvyn Bragg, Stella Butler, Vahni Capildeo and John Whale
Foreword by
Series: Brotherton Poetry Prize
Categories: 21st Century, Anthologies, British, Language, Women
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Categories: 21st Century, Anthologies, British, Language, Women
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (96 pages)
(Due Feb 2022)
9781800172241
£12.99 £11.69
- Description
- Editors
- Awards
- Reviews
The University of Leeds has a long tradition of engagement with poets, many of whom have been members of staff or creative writing fellows. Its Brotherton Library houses the archives of several outstanding contemporary poets and its Poetry Centre celebrates this rich heritage with a new generation of poets. The Brotherton Poetry Prize is the University's latest expression of commitment to poetry as a living art. This anthology is a distillation of the best poems from the second Brotherton Prize.
Awards won by Vahni Capildeo
Long-listed, 2020 The BOCAS Prize for Caribbean Literature (Skin Can Hold)
Short-listed, 2018 The Forward Prize for Best Collection (Venus as a Bear)
Winner, 2018 Poetry Book Society Summer Choice (Venus as a Bear)
Short-listed, 2016 T.S. Eliot Prize (Measures of Expatriation)
Winner, 2016 Poetry Book Society Choice (Measures of Expatriation)
Winner, 2016 Forward Prize for Best Collection
(Measures of Expatriation)
(Measures of Expatriation)
Praise for Vahni Capildeo
Chrissy Williams, Poetry London
'Masterfully moves between so many forms that the brilliance for any voyager en-route is immediately palpable.'
SPAM Zine Books of the Year 2019
'On your feet, then, the syntax poems sing, dismantling the traditional audience-speaker receivership of performed, and read, poetry.'
CaribbeanBeat
'An adventurous and verbally challenging texture, moving across conceptual distances at great speed, avoiding the conventional mechanisms of depiction or statement, but rhythmically alive in a way that draws the reader after her down unknown paths.'
Peter Riley, The Fortnighly Review
'This new collection is a tour de force of theatrical speculation'
Jade Cuttle, Guardian Poetry Review Roundup
'Capildeo's intelligence, learning, wit, anger, skill and insight appear to be, on the evidence so far, limitless... This is poetry which is interested in looking for the truth with the only tool we have to do so, language... This is real - stop, slow down, read, think - poetry.'
Wood Bee Poet
'Vahni Capildeo's latest, Venus as a Bear, is virtuosic and difficult, inviting and resistant, and gives the sense that there is nothing - form or subject - out of Capildeo's reach.'
John Challis, Poetry Salzburg Review
'Industrious and prolific, Vahni Capildeo is a writer of apparently effortless variety in form and content...She belongs to no tribe or school or movement This may make her a "poet's poet", one for the cognoscenti; and yet, as Venus as a Bear demonstrates, she deserves the widest audience possible'
Graeme Richardson, The TLS
'I can't stop re-reading it.'
Kate Wakeling, The Morning Star
'Capildeo's subjects - sculptures, moss, sugar, roses, birds and pet cats - create counternarratives to the grammar of empire and the sentences of the state. Words themselves denature andre form like museum objects acquiring or losing their human associations.'
Sandeep Parmar, The Guardian
'Capildeo creates poems like spyglasses, like fully-equipped decks of observation, so that we might be present and entranced, hooked in the startling, surefooted immediacy of the worlds these poems invoke...It is through work such as this that we find ourselves revivified to a thousand electric possibilities'
Shivanee Ramlochan, Carribbean Beat
'These poems offer a glimpse of radical innocence, earning that innocence because they don't take their eye off the experience on which it depends.'
Jack Belloli, Review 31
'With a glassmith's unerring skill, Capiledo stays at the fixed point between the conceptual barrier and the breaking point. It is a sensitivity that shapes her poetic technique in turn.'
Jade Cuttle, Brixton Review of Books
'At their essence, these are poems that explore how we relate to both each other and the 'other'. Venus as a Bear is well worth the time and effort to walk around the poems and then to step outside them, following where they lead.'
Kim Moore, Poetry London Issue 91
'The volume resists any easy form of categorisation, but overall, the word that came to mind is 'proximity', and how a dynamic measure of nearness shapes out relationships with objects, animals, language, and place.'
Emily Kate Timms, Stand Volume 16 (3)
'The book is studded with startling images and linguistic strings which embroil and surprise the reader.'
Martyn Crucefix, Magma 71 Online Review
Vahni Capildeo has a gift for examining the lives of others, whether they are distanced by species, era of divinity. Her tender tone makes it all the more jarring when compassion is cut with sudden brutality.'
Maria Crawford, The Financial Times
'The book is bursting with ideas, every line bringing something new to puzzle, excite, amuse and delight'
Chris Edgoose, Wood Bee Poet
'The words' play with each other, their transfer of symbol, their passing-across of meaning and connotation creates a surreal and abstract imagery that could inspire multiple understandings.'
Chris Edgoose, Wood Bee Poet
'More than any collection I've read, this is one whose language is a tool for transformation, a means by which things are revealed...We are shown things clearly and newly because Capildeo's language works to bring them out of themselves.'
Chris Edgoose, Wood Bee Poet
'...Among other things it is a bestiary from the poets travels: "a fade of rabbits", a bulls swaying haunches like "a big black valentine", The Magnificent Pigs of Thetford". Roll over, Ted Hughes.'
Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Sunday Times
'A bald enumeration of Capildeo's influences, subjects, travel destinations and poetic forms might give an impression of dizzying multifariousness.... But the essential remains the same throughout. Capildeo, it is only fair to acknowledge, is a demanding writer, someone who stretches the conventions of the lyric poem in unprecedented ways; but Venus as a Bear demands nothing from its readers that it does not also repay generously. She is, among much else, a direct and sensual poet, warmly intimate and very funny.'
David Wheatley, The Guardian
'Capildeo remains a sui generis talent... Much like its predecessor, Venus as a Bear is 100-plus pages of constant self-reinvention'
The Telegraph, Poetry Book of the Month May 2018
'This is a book to last, and one that I will keep reading. It is a collection in which new threads appear in every reading: a tapestry that refuses to be frozen.'
Stand Magazine
'This is a highly original collection in form and content, with blunted messages and sharp polished undertones. One to read slowly and savour.'
Poetry Salzberg Review on Measures of Expatriation
'So much of the world has been rendered familiar by the industries of interpretation (including the literary) 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's Measures of Expatriation is a work that amazes. We found a vertiginous excitement in the way in which the book grasps its subject: the sense of never quite being at home. This is poetry that transforms. When people in the future seek to know what it's like to live between places, traditions, habits and cultures, they will read this. Here is the language for what expatriation feels like.'
Malika Booker, Chair of the 2016 Forward Prize judging panel
'The writing is done from word to word, following images, sounds, movement and sense-associations relentlessly, shifting focus every few words, heading for an unforeseen ending.'
Peter Riley, Fortnightly Review
'Tumbling, polyglottal collection of poems and prose-poems, Measures of Expatriation, tells stories of exile and migration by turns playful and ferocious.'
Horatia Harrod, Financial Times
'Capildeo's poetry explores the ambiguity and capaciousness of language, and is deeply interested in the provisionality of meaning.'
Francesca Bratton, The Compass
'It has a sense of purpose, and its playfulness is infectious... There is a sharpnes to the observations and a bold specificity to their articulation, often presented with an eye for humour. Capildeo's delight in this experiment is evident' Francesca Bratton, The Compass
Chrissy Williams, Poetry London
'Masterfully moves between so many forms that the brilliance for any voyager en-route is immediately palpable.'
SPAM Zine Books of the Year 2019
'On your feet, then, the syntax poems sing, dismantling the traditional audience-speaker receivership of performed, and read, poetry.'
CaribbeanBeat
'An adventurous and verbally challenging texture, moving across conceptual distances at great speed, avoiding the conventional mechanisms of depiction or statement, but rhythmically alive in a way that draws the reader after her down unknown paths.'
Peter Riley, The Fortnighly Review
'This new collection is a tour de force of theatrical speculation'
Jade Cuttle, Guardian Poetry Review Roundup
'Capildeo's intelligence, learning, wit, anger, skill and insight appear to be, on the evidence so far, limitless... This is poetry which is interested in looking for the truth with the only tool we have to do so, language... This is real - stop, slow down, read, think - poetry.'
Wood Bee Poet
'Vahni Capildeo's latest, Venus as a Bear, is virtuosic and difficult, inviting and resistant, and gives the sense that there is nothing - form or subject - out of Capildeo's reach.'
John Challis, Poetry Salzburg Review
'Industrious and prolific, Vahni Capildeo is a writer of apparently effortless variety in form and content...She belongs to no tribe or school or movement This may make her a "poet's poet", one for the cognoscenti; and yet, as Venus as a Bear demonstrates, she deserves the widest audience possible'
Graeme Richardson, The TLS
'In Venus as a Bear, Vahni Capildeo succeeds at revealing and stretching the potential of contemporary poetry with a dynamic selection of poems that demonstrate time and again their widely varied interests, knowledge, and all-round poetic skills.'
Helena Fornells, The Scores Poetry Journal
Helena Fornells, The Scores Poetry Journal
Kate Wakeling, The Morning Star
'Capildeo's subjects - sculptures, moss, sugar, roses, birds and pet cats - create counternarratives to the grammar of empire and the sentences of the state. Words themselves denature and
Sandeep Parmar, The Guardian
'Capildeo creates poems like spyglasses, like fully-equipped decks of observation, so that we might be present and entranced, hooked in the startling, surefooted immediacy of the worlds these poems invoke...It is through work such as this that we find ourselves revivified to a thousand electric possibilities'
Shivanee Ramlochan, Carribbean Beat
'These poems offer a glimpse of radical innocence, earning that innocence because they don't take their eye off the experience on which it depends.'
Jack Belloli, Review 31
'With a glassmith's unerring skill, Capiledo stays at the fixed point between the conceptual barrier and the breaking point. It is a sensitivity that shapes her poetic technique in turn.'
Jade Cuttle, Brixton Review of Books
'At their essence, these are poems that explore how we relate to both each other and the 'other'. Venus as a Bear is well worth the time and effort to walk around the poems and then to step outside them, following where they lead.'
Kim Moore, Poetry London Issue 91
'The volume resists any easy form of categorisation, but overall, the word that came to mind is 'proximity', and how a dynamic measure of nearness shapes out relationships with objects, animals, language, and place.'
Emily Kate Timms, Stand Volume 16 (3)
'The book is studded with startling images and linguistic strings which embroil and surprise the reader.'
Martyn Crucefix, Magma 71 Online Review
Vahni Capildeo has a gift for examining the lives of others, whether they are distanced by species, era of divinity. Her tender tone makes it all the more jarring when compassion is cut with sudden brutality.'
Maria Crawford, The Financial Times
'The book is bursting with ideas, every line bringing something new to puzzle, excite, amuse and delight'
Chris Edgoose, Wood Bee Poet
'The words' play with each other, their transfer of symbol, their passing-across of meaning and connotation creates a surreal and abstract imagery that could inspire multiple understandings.'
Chris Edgoose, Wood Bee Poet
'More than any collection I've read, this is one whose language is a tool for transformation, a means by which things are revealed...We are shown things clearly and newly because Capildeo's language works to bring them out of themselves.'
Chris Edgoose, Wood Bee Poet
'...Among other things it is a bestiary from the poets travels: "a fade of rabbits", a bulls swaying haunches like "a big black valentine", The Magnificent Pigs of Thetford". Roll over, Ted Hughes.'
Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Sunday Times
'It generates constant energy... The flurry of excitement, the sheer bounce of words on the line and off the page, captures at first the essence of affable, tail-wagging pet-dogginess and, later on, the dog's liberating, unleashed flight from domestic obedience.'
Carol Rumens, The Guardian, on 'They (may forget (their names (if let out)))' from Venus as a Bear - poem of the week 21st May 2018'A bald enumeration of Capildeo's influences, subjects, travel destinations and poetic forms might give an impression of dizzying multifariousness.... But the essential remains the same throughout. Capildeo, it is only fair to acknowledge, is a demanding writer, someone who stretches the conventions of the lyric poem in unprecedented ways; but Venus as a Bear demands nothing from its readers that it does not also repay generously. She is, among much else, a direct and sensual poet, warmly intimate and very funny.'
David Wheatley, The Guardian
'Capildeo remains a sui generis talent... Much like its predecessor, Venus as a Bear is 100-plus pages of constant self-reinvention'
The Telegraph, Poetry Book of the Month May 2018
'This is a book to last, and one that I will keep reading. It is a collection in which new threads appear in every reading: a tapestry that refuses to be frozen.'
Stand Magazine
'This is a highly original collection in form and content, with blunted messages and sharp polished undertones. One to read slowly and savour.'
Poetry Salzberg Review on Measures of Expatriation
'So much of the world has been rendered familiar by the industries of interpretation (including the literary) 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's Measures of Expatriation is a work that amazes. We found a vertiginous excitement in the way in which the book grasps its subject: the sense of never quite being at home. This is poetry that transforms. When people in the future seek to know what it's like to live between places, traditions, habits and cultures, they will read this. Here is the language for what expatriation feels like.'
Malika Booker, Chair of the 2016 Forward Prize judging panel
'The writing is done from word to word, following images, sounds, movement and sense-associations relentlessly, shifting focus every few words, heading for an unforeseen ending.'
Peter Riley, Fortnightly Review
'Tumbling, polyglottal collection of poems and prose-poems, Measures of Expatriation, tells stories of exile and migration by turns playful and ferocious.'
Horatia Harrod, Financial Times
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