Literature X Ecology Series with Anthony Vahni Capildeo

Conversation held on Thursday 9th May 2024

In this online reading and conversation, Anthony Vahni Capildeo talked about ‘Stony Songs’, poems that engage with fuzziness and stoniness, the appeal of texture, and contact as a way of interrelating or knowing. They read and discussed ultra-new work and poems from their forthcoming collection Polkadot Wounds.

*

Polkadot Wounds (Carcanet, forthcoming July 2024) looks at bodies, queerness, travel, and environments, with the title poem inspired by the martyr St Cuthbert Mayne. Polkadot Wounds brings home the delight, frustration, restlessness and continuity of striving to live a connected human life in our fragmenting times.

*

Anthony V. Capildeo FRSL is Professor and Writer in Residence at the University of York. Their site-specific word and visual arts include 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. Recent publications include Like a Tree, Walking (Carcanet, 2021) (Poetry Book Society Choice) and A Happiness (Intergraphia, 2022). Their interests include collaborative work and traditional masquerade. Capildeo served as a judge for the Jhalak Prize (2023).

*

The event was chaired by poet Lucy Mercer, Postdoctoral Research Fellow (RENEW).

Please email for more information: l.mercer@exeter.ac.uk

‘Polkadot Wounds’ by Anthony Vahni Capildeo (Click on the images to find out more). Design credit: Elspeth Duncan