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Venus as a Bear by Vahni Capildeo review – direct, intimate and funny

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From Björk to beasts … impressive cross-cultural investigations into the natural world

A good place to find bears in Roman Britain would have been north of the Antonine Wall, the subject of a poem in Vahni Capildeo’s Venus as a Bear. “I want you like I want a wall / I want you in bits”, we read in “Romano-Celtic Contact in the Antonine Display, Hunterian Museum, Glasgow”, though the “bits” here refer to archaeological remains rather than the aftermath of a human-ursine encounter. As the author of the outstanding Measures of Expatriation, winner of the 2016 Forward prize, Capildeo has already given evidence of her border-crossing imagination, and in Venus as a Bear she expands her cross-cultural investigations into the natural world.

Björk fans will catch the allusion in the title to “Venus as a Boy’” and in “Björk/Birch Tree” Capildeo celebrates creaturely transformations: “Lady into swan, come down; swan into sea, / set down; fire from the sea, set out; reach; launch.” As a genre, the bestiary has appealed to poets from Guillaume Apollinaire to DH Lawrence to Donika Kelly, with the interest lying as much in its classificatory challenge as in the animals themselves. “What is the term / for the gathering of one falcon?”, asks “Day, with Hawk”, while “The Last Night, a Nightingale” worries that our interest in them may not be such good news for the animals (“Whoever drew you also caged you”).

Capildeo is engaged in remaking poetic style rather than accommodating herself to it

Related: Measures of Expatriation by Vahni Capildeo review – ‘language is my home’

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