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Venus as a bear

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The Poetry Book Society Summer 2018 Choice. Shortlisted for The 2018 Forward Prize for Best Collection.

Vahni Capildeo's Venus as a Bear collects poems on animals, art, language, the sea, thinghood, metaphor, description, and dance.

They tend toward, and tend to, the inanimate and non-human, tenderly disclosing their forms of sentience.

We have feelings for creatures, objects and places, but where do these affinities come from?

How do things, as things, affect us, remain mysterious while making themselves known?

For Capildeo answers formed at their own pace, while waiting for lambing at a friend's farm; exploring the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford; criss-crossing the British Isles with the Out of Bounds poetry project; or hearing of Africa and the Romans in Scotland, of Guyana and Shakespeare, while standing over-the-boots deep in a freezing sea off the coast of Wales.

Many of the poems respond to real places, objects and people, as investigations, meditations, or dedications.

They dwell on bodies and dwell in the body, inviting ardent, open forms of reading, in the spirit of their composition.

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Product Details
Carcanet Press Ltd
1784105546 / 9781784105549
Paperback / softback
821.92
26/04/2018
United Kingdom
English
111 pages
22 cm
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