Like a tree, walking

Vahni Capildeo
Carcanet

In Like a tree, walking, Vahni Capildeo captures surrendering moments and renders the readers on a journey that encompasses and exemplifies both the pensive and proactive lens in equal measure. This new collection explores connections to roots and what happens when one is suddenly uprooted and forced to move (voluntarily or not); within the momentum of these constant shifts, the reader is obliged to relocate and reconsider themselves as deeper variations, displaced and nestled between the intricate variant forms of poetry embedded throughout the book.

This collection has a fundamental focus on eco-poetics which explores a variation of places and the migratory tone of displacement begins from the first very first poem itself: ‘in Praise of the birds of climate change, forest warblers / bringing a new songs to the suburbs.’ (‘In Praise of Birds’)

Like a tree, walking is divided into several sections, each unique and reflective like strolls over differing days and leading every crescendo to a unique epiphany. Observations in silence and nature—‘Silence runs like treacle / over flint; coffee; river water; new / words, like petrichor; green willows,no words.’ (‘If there is an afterwards’)—are beautifully mirrored but displaced sporadically throughout the sequences, creating interesting juxtapositions between entombed technological city and the effervescent regality of nature adrift. This constant tug of war is perhaps highlighted most effectively in the poem ‘Erasure as Drift / Kinde Yernings’ which introduces unspoken silences and otherworldly nocturnal presences yearning to find purpose

‘I am ghost ly / I a m / cloth as close.’

The idea of place in its many variants is again highlighted in a sequence titled ‘Windrush Reflection’ which is consumed in the search for the self in a political and social space. As if placing the enlightened, realised body could pave the way forward to a more balanced world: ‘Family near me. Know the area. Explore. Enjoy. / I walk around the park / and I found a friend. / Please sing another song.’ (‘IV. Windrush Leeds Cento’)

This is a wonderful new collection from Capildeo, exploring through their own lens not just the innate fragmentary prism of nature but a wider context of realising and placing the self within. There is a city beneath the city beneath the city beneath the floodplain (VIII. ‘That’s Epic’)

In the words of the poet themself: ‘It is a trace of wonder and yearning as I look back from place to place. These journeys, or rather these points of rest, are encoded in between the rows of lines and the leaves of the book.’

—Shehzar Doja