About the Book
Winner of the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry 2025
Winner of the OCM Bocas Poetry Prize for Caribbean Literature 2025
A Telegraph Book of the Year 2024
Polkadot Wounds is a delight, wrestling with life in our restless times. Capildeo entices us to enter conversations with others (dead and living), amongst glimpsing reflections of encounters. Landscapes become 'landskips', playing on traditions of travel and nature writing, childlike spontaneity and movement across gaps. Dante's Divine Comedy frames untimely deaths and breakthroughs of joy, during the pandemic and in queer and far-flung communities. The title of the book is inspired by the stones of the ruined Norman castle in Launceston, Cornwall, and the local martyr, St Cuthbert Mayne, where Capildeo was writer-in-residence with the Charles Causley Trust.
About the Author :
Anthony V. Capildeo FRSL is a Trinidadian Scottish writer of poetry and non-fiction. Currently Professor and Writer in Residence at the University of York, their site-specific word and visual art includes 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. Their numerous books and pamphlets, from No Traveller Returns (Salt, 2003), Person Animal Figure (Landfill, 2005) onwards, are distinguished by deliberate engagement with independent and small presses. Their work has been recognized with the Cholmondeley Award (Society of Authors) and the Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection. Their publications include Like a Tree, Walking (Carcanet, 2021) (Poetry Book Society Choice), and A Happiness (Intergraphia, 2022). Their interests include silence, translation theory, medieval reworkings, plurilingualism, collaborative work, and traditional masquerade. Recent commissions include research-based Windrush poems for Poet in the City and for the Royal Society of Literature. Capildeo served as a judge for the Jhalak Prize (2023).
Review :
'Anthony Vahni Capildeo is among the most original and vital poets writing today. Capildeo's poetic language is its own creature, a bestiary, fierce and tender, generous and resilient.It's an ecology in which stone may run like honey, island history can pour down stairwells, and a mobile phone vibrates as archaically as a struck flint. In Polkadot Wounds, imagination makes space for some of the deepest and most questioning work of faith. The poems demonstrate again and again how attention can be an act of radical hospitality; reading them is to be reminded that this is not just an activity of writing, but a way of being-in-the-world.'
Tiffany Atkinson
'Anthony Vahni Capildeo is the best poet - the most creatively various, intellectually dextrous, uncomplacent and uncomplaisant - I know of in the UK. From book to book, and in a spirit of experimentation defiant of the demand to "find one's voice" (ugh) and stick to it, they have engaged histories, and literatures, from across the globe.'
Vidyan Ravinthiran
'Capildeo's ecologies of attention riddle landscape with prayer, essay, letter, song, a calendar of the elements, through an intricate variety of forms that blend and recompose these genres. The personal is earthly in these poems, placing tender calls beyond pronouns to a more-than-human community—addressing the politics of relationships through art that does not "mend with gold" but spells for us the "infinitely more/ precious, and perhaps survivable" commons of our vulnerability. Demonstrating in delightfully queer language games how we, including the tiger worms in the compost bin, are transformed through one another, Polkadot Wounds is not a book to be read only once but a breviary for safekeeping and recitation in difficult weather.'
Jonathan Skinner
'The bees, the bells, "vermiliion wormbodies," the invisible world and the constantly visible ocean, inside us, far from us, close to the poet's lines of descent; the timebox and its refrains, the motif of flight: everything comes together in this sparkling book of responses, of interlocutions, a poet situating a body of work amid other bodies and other poets, a poet making litanies, multiple linguistic registers, happen, making them fly, not from us but all around us. This exciting book could be Capildeo's finest yet: come for the querewolves. Stay for the panoply. For the capacity. For the face of the moon. For the plenty.'
Stephanie Burt
'It's a common promotional gambit to say a particular voice is unique, but in the case of Anthony (Vahni) Capildeo it's true... These poems are formal yet fragmented, sophisticated but childlike, confrontational but loveable... Capildeo is a poet who, finding themselves on holy ground, delights in making mud pies.'
Graeme Richardson, The Sunday Times
'At every turn refuses the easy, numbing music of pastoral, preferring other languages, portmanteaus, even typographic sforzandos... Many of these poems are dedicated to others, dead and living, revealing a metapoetics of entanglement and community, those whom the poet wishes they could "walk to the lighthouse with". Thematically, formally and linguistically, this is a dizzyingly restless collection, but Capildeo renders "life like life itself", converting readers into those "who [love] the rollercoaster".' Oluwaseun Olayiwola, The Guardian
