Masqueraders

Anthony V. Capildeo FRSL is a Trinidadian Scottish writer of poetry and non-fiction. Currently Professor and Writer in Residence at the University of York, their site-specific word and visual art includes responses to Cornwall's former capital, Launceston, as the Causley Trust Poet in Residence (2022) and to the Ubatuba granite of the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds (2023), as well as to Scottish, Irish, and Caribbean built and natural environments. Their numerous books and pamphlets, from No Traveller Returns (Salt, 2003), Person Animal Figure (Landfill, 2005) onwards, are distinguished by deliberate engagement with independent and small presses. Their work has been recognized with the Cholmondeley Award (Society of Authors) and the Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection. Their publications include Like a Tree, Walking (Carcanet, 2021) (Poetry Book Society Choice), and A Happiness (Intergraphia, 2022). Their interests include silence, translation theory, medieval reworkings, plurilingualism, collaborative work, and traditional masquerade. Recent commissions include research-based Windrush poems for Poet in the City and for the Royal Society of Literature. Capildeo served as a judge for the Jhalak Prize (2023).Jeremy Noel-Tod studied at New College, Oxford and now teaches at the University of East Anglia. In 2004, he founded Landfill, a poetry pamphlet press, and became an Associate Editor of Eggbox Publishing. He regularly reviews for the Times Literary Supplement and the Daily Telegraph.

‘Capildeo’s sentences are taut, elaborate, world-building, reaching out to the other – to the limits of otherness in experience and language – before springing back to expose something intimately known or wholly surprising. In these essays, letters, reports, echoes, fables, explorations of faith, Capildeo moves beyond the grasp of political and ecological violence, even as they bear witness to its various forms. “The memory of having read a book,” writes Capildeo (paraphrasing the woman who ran the bead shop near Helmsley), “is like kissing with synæsthesia.” That, too, is the experience of reading this book: senses are mingled, solitudes joined, and certainties confounded.’Will Harris