Caribbean poets are having a moment. When Vahni Capildeo won the Forward Prize for best collection last month it was the third year in a row that a Caribbean poet had won (following Claudia Rankine and Kei Miller).
It was also the second year running in which a genre-challenging miscellany of a book had taken the prize (following Rankine's Citizen). Capildeo's Measures of Expatriation (Carcanet, £9.99) comprises poems, prose poems, memoir, dream diaries, letters, art criticism, anecdote and travel writing, an unstable-looking job lot that is united by Capildeo's trouble with, as her title puts it, expatriation.
Originally from Trinidad but long resident in the UK, Capildeo is quizzical, sometimes funny and often critical about her to and fro across national cultures.
When she reveals that she and the novelist VS Naipaul are cousins it is possible to see her work’s resemblance to his many hybrid interpretations of a life of expatriation and travel.
This leads her into a double-edged account of an interview where Capildeo both acknowledges and distances herself from Naipaul: "What about VS Naipaul in the fifties and sixties? Was he in England then? – I was born in Trinidad, in 1973" (The Book of Dreams/Livres de Cauchemars).
She is uneasy with larger ideas of community, and her feeling of displacement is as evident in Trinidad as in Oxford. The title poem travels across Schengen Europe, where she invents a “God of Obstacles” to represent the passport offices and border police who attend to her situation, one of whom has never heard of Trinidad: “I tried to trace what shocked me in the momentary non-existence of my smaller island. To my horror it was that they should have heard of it because . . . because . . . I reposed a trust in cricket and football.”
This, as well as almost every other page of the book, raises questions about what exactly constitutes identity, especially when that identity is taken out of our hands. Capildeo is witty and prolific about the unsettled situations in which she finds herself, but she is cannily aware of language as a network that has designs on her person.
In In 2190, Albion's Civil Conflicts Finally Divided we read : "Let's start a conversation. Ask me where I'm from. / Where is home, really home. Where my parents were born. / What to do if I sound more like you than you do. / Every word an exhalation, a driving-out."
The book's memorable first poem Handfast is more constructive, offering images of shelter as it calls out to a circling hawk:
She is the point of any sky.
Come here, here, here:
if it's a tree you'd sulk in, I am pine;
if earth, I'm risen terracotta;
if it's all to air you'd turn, turn to me.
You are flying inside me.
Two other books shortlisted for the prize demonstrate the depth and variety of new work being published in the UK. Denise Riley's elegy for her adult son A Part Song won the Forward Prize for best single poem in 2012.
It is remarkable, carefully brutal about its own process (“A soft black gown with pearl corsage / Won’t assuage your smashed ménage”) but tender and devastating about her subject and the exponential loss she has suffered (“It was a man who died, and in him died / The large-eyed boy, then the teen peacock / In the unremarked placid self-devouring / That makes up being alive.”)
Say Something Back (Picador, £9.99) collects this astonishing poem, whose concerns and tones recur in its other sequences: the patient who had no insides, whose starting point is a hospital stay leading up to a operation for acute pancreatitis and her incredulous, fascinated recognition of "what's packed below skin", a gramophone on the subject commemorates the first World War even as it contests the idea of commemoration: "His name's got weightier than him. / He's been peeled off from it. / It didn't much suit him in his life. / That went AWOL. Poor fit."
Riley's stunning short lyrics likewise come to a halt at mortal insights. Looking heavenwards, she wishes, in Under the Answering Sky:
I would catch, not my echo,
but their guarantee that this
bright flat blue is a mouth
of the world speaking back.
Pythian, though, is sharp and clear about the limits of lyric poems: "A cry reels around, though it's not a Cassandra's but something more speaker-free. / There was and there is a life, I swim in it, but I wouldn't say that it's exactly 'mine'."
Say Something Back is a work of rare achievement, Riley's first full new collection since 1985's Dry Air (Virago) and a book that will be occupying readers' minds for years to come.
Alice Oswald's Falling Awake (Cape, £10) continues to mine a fresh, inventive seam of observational poetry, tuned in to revelation and a feeling for those moments when the world seems to become strangely, truly itself. Oswald's best poems bear comparison with DH Lawrence's late work: dashed-off, urgent notes on flowers and animals and birds, with surprising, interrupting images, as when Swan launches into its subject's take-off, "hurrying away from the plane-crash mess of her wings", or when A Rushed Account of the Dew addresses its subject: "oh pristine example / of claiming a place on earth / only to cancel".
The book’s closing long poem is an account of a dawn, written from the perspective of Tithonus, who fades out of the poem as day begins.
In lesser hands it could be a disaster, a well-trodden parody of poetic material. The material does feels laboured and vaguer across its 40 pages, although studded with typically sudden and revealing images.
Another poem here, Dunt: A Poem for a Dried-up River, is the true star of the collection, fixing a despairing eye on one particular river's decline:
little loose end shorthand unrepresented
beautiful disused route to the sea
fish path with nearly no fish in
John McAuliffe's fourth book, The Way In (Gallery), was joint winner of the 2016 Michael Hartnett Poetry Award. He teaches poetry at the University of Manchester's Centre for New Writing
