Polkadot Wounds by Anthony Vahni Capildeo review - 'there are some intriguing experiments'

The strongest work in this new collection of poems by Anthony Vahni Capildeo is charged with palpable anger over the Windrush scandal, writes Stuart Kelly

There is little consensus nowadays about what constitutes a poem, and less perhaps about whether, if something is considered to be a poem, it is a good poem or not. Most people would probably agree that Carol Anne Duffy and Wendy Cope are poets and might be able to articulate their preference: I doubt such a discussion might be had on the relative merits of Denise Riley and Rupi Kaur. Give the size of the audience for contemporary poetry, it can seem as recondite and hence heated as debating the finer points of tatting or brass rubbing.Although in one poem, Anthony Vahni Capildeo appears to “promise / amazement, if only / I can stop seeing everything upside-down, / seeing everything upside down”, the effect seems to me more opaque than it is oblique. A different version of their aesthetic is in “Steal This”, where an artefact “was not mislabelled as a ritual object, unlike the broken combs, cosmetic jars and other inexplicable mystery discards… it was labelled as a toy”. It is perhaps language itself that “for four thousand years nobody has played with”, with the poem ending, both seductively and threateningly “I don’t mind if you break it. Don’t worry about anything. Don’t worry. Let’s play”.

There is certainly a ludic quality to Capildeo’s verse: “Youth”, to quote it in full, reads “every each day best / bring up the girl without pink / says princess daddy / eat rhoticity chicken / resist transgressive dickery”. Successive lines undercut and problematise, but to my ear the puns seem rather too self-regarding. Readers may find it problematic negotiating the number of dedicatees and literary borrowings. For example, some of the people I know, or have met, or have read; but how much knowledge is assumed or necessary? I have no idea who the Pauline is who likes blue cheese in “Island Conversations, Inishbofin”, and do not know if my exclusion is part of the point. In a similar vein, are poems that are “site specific” responses comprehensible when untethered from the genius loci?

There are two stand out works here, “A Short Prayer to Coffee, which Crosses The Sea” and “Turn and Live”, about the Windrush scandal. The palpable anger (“is the name of a ship / not of a generation”) is telling, the transformation of de Gaulle’s “specks of dust” into something “stabilizing as many colours” is redemptive. At the same time, it seems merely decorative that there is a buried allusion to TS Eliot’s “The Naming Of Cats” – “The naming of ships is a terrible thing” – especially when the actual namings are more punchy and punishing. Technically there are some intriguing experiments – two poems are “carved” out of William Empson’s “Aubade”, although occasionally the placing of words does not quite match up to their position in the original. “She Wants A Fire, Even In Summer” has an incantatory, folk-wisdom feel; and some of the more lyrical moments are impeccably honed (“myrtle amethyst / yew rose and thyme”) but a nag persists, that this is written for a coterie of which you are not a part. Given their work often deals with race and gender, Capildeo might fairly observe that poetry has been an exclusionary space for quite some time.The Demon Tracts is supposedly written by one Kristján Norge, a Norwegian-Shetlandic experimental poet who died in mysterious circumstances in 1961. Kristján Norge and his work is also central to a longer work, Ravage: An Astonishment Of Fire, purportedly edited by the musician and artist MacGillivray, itself a “matrilineal” pen-name of Kirsten Norrie, whose non-fiction Scottish Lost Boys comes out next year, and includes work on those pseudonymists and demonologists James “Ossian” Macpherson and Walter “Author of Waverley” Scott. I think the apposite phrase, therefore, is that she “has form” in terms of metafictional sleight of hand. Ravage claims The Demon Tracts came out in 2023, but the copy here is dated 2024. Such slippages in time seem unsurprising given the eldritch nature of the work.

The National Windrush Monument by Basil Watson at London's Waterloo Station. PIC: Carl Court/Getty Images

It is perhaps best to approach this work not as a poem or series of poems, but as an art installation that is inveigling its way into reality (there is a short film that can accessed on Vimeo). It has, in fact, a great deal in common with online “analog horror” works such as Greylock or The Backrooms / The Oldest View: archaic technologies, a pared down sense of the ominous. Almost alone among contemporary Scottish poetry I have read, this is unswervingly serious. It is work to be experienced rather than deciphered. The Demon Tracts records Norge’s breakdown as he realises he is a demon, an image in God’s memory palace. But of what is he an aide-memoire? MacGillivray cleaves to archetypal, simple images: blood, ash, lighthouse, salt, the unheimlich “watermarked in flame”, a self-conjured Tarot. These poems have a profound engagement with Dante. Curiously, Capildeo has three poems on the Commedia that are glib in comparison. Norje/Norrie/McGillivray seems to me close to Modernists such as David Jones, Geoffrey Hill or Anne Carson. This is a work which offers you paths to decode it, while frustrating the attempt. Capildeo wants someone to “maze me away”. I prefer to be blind and lost in Norrie’s labyrinth.

Polkadot Wounds by Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Carcanet, £12.99; The Demon Tracts by Kristján Norge, Broken Sleep Books, £13.99