Book Review…Vintage Capildeo delivers

Mar 16, 2014 News

Book: Utter by Vahni Capildeo
Critic: Dr Glenville Ashby

Vahni Capildeo’s “Utter,” reaches into the belly of the subconscious. It’s intuitive poetry that bellows with unbridled angst. Hardly is Capildeo an activist in the likes of Velma Pollard, her contemporary. She cries out, but her words seem smothered. It signifies an inability to express weighty emotions openly. There are feelings metaphorically wrapped, refusing to budge, remaining in the loins of a masterful poet. An irony of ironies, no doubt.

The book cover of Utter

“Utter” is Jungian in scope, a poetic version of Stanislav Grof’s psychological work, bleeding a ribald consciousness that struggles to break free and creating more internal havoc for its creator in the process. At times symbolic, the reader is challenged to interpret. Not an easy undertaking by any means. But think and you will decode Utter’s paradoxes and enigmas. It will take time, but it’s an endeavour well worth the effort.
“Utter” harps back to the days when poetry provoked the readers’ intellect, oftentimes leaving them unhinged as they unravelled a searing literary labyrinth of diverse meanings. Call this classical poetry, if you will. In “Utter,” hope struggles to peer through Capildeo’s mental imbroglio and any semblance of free-spiritedness is blanketed. Caplideo is almost tortured by her surroundings, her life, her loves, her culture.
She zeros in on maritime life. There is symbology in the water and on a more pedestrian level it is emblematic of working class struggles – the pain, the resignation and the self-induced panacea. Tusk is one of her most haunting pieces; it is deftly written with an evenness of tone and colour. A quietly delivered, almost philosophical message, that bores the heart of the most incorrigible culprit.
“I have achieved such a polish presentation oh as never before, you who are not my love, purely in curved transmitter glow; you have a terrible memory; you who are not my love. I am feeling to bowl along and bite you on the leg.”
Interestingly, “In a Dream” borders on fatalism, even thanatology.
The quintessential poet, Capildeo views life, history and culture, through a skewed prism. She refuses to dismiss cultural superstitions and fables as illusory. In “Into Darkness/Plus Que Noir”, she welcomes and integrates the most notorious figments of the imagination. But are they really? No, suggests Capildeo. They are authentic, meaningful and a shot in the arm for those who care to discern. They tell us more about ourselves than even the most accomplished psychoanalyst. Of the Trinidad mythical “loupgarou,” she writes: “Speak to me though I cannot answer. These days I cannot think and speak when you are near. ..The “louparou” is a lover, Perennial and never let in.” And of the “douen” she views as dwelling “on the past, Allured by the facelessness we follow.” If only we knew.
Capildeo explores a life bereft of love in “In a Dream,” a subtly poignant and emotive piece. In “Gift of a Staircase,” there is yearning for requited love, so passionate that it is washed with a biblical undercurrent: “I desire you attentive to the unpicking of your own ribcage. I desire you vertiginous if you rise, if you walk if you remain. I desire you with ascent.” Here, she truly utters, soaring emotionally, with desires expectant.
Some of Capildeo’s works are ambivalent, indecisive, as she offers up her personal side, her ambitions. There are dashes of mundane introspection: “I was happy; now I am one of those: I am unhappy…I am thinking of leaving. But where should I go? It’s strange that you should say that. I almost went there years ago,” she muses in “For Z.”,
But she is far more at ease in her poetic cocoon.
Surely, Capildeo is abstruse, adept, tailoring and weaving her art with varying linguistic expressions.
To aficionados of this literary genre, to the existentialist moved by spirit and intuition, Capildeo is a precious gem; to all others, brace for a work of magnetic befuddlement. Capildeo is that good. That complex.

Utter by Vahni Capldeo, 2013
Publisher: Peepal Tree Press, UK
Available: amazon.com
Rating: Interesting read
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