Masqueraders
Selected Essays
Will be published approx. on 30. July 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
280 pages
978-1-80017-569-3 (ISBN)
Description
Anthony V. Capildeo's new book brings together a selection of their brilliant essays, letters and columns, many of them published in the leading poetry journal PN Review. The essays are, almost by default, an account of the life of a poet, charting Capildeo's journeys to and experiences of festivals, conferences and commissions, showing how poets live now.
Reviews / Votes
'As anyone who loves Anthony V. Capildeo's poetry will know, they are a genius of syntax. Capildeo's sentences hold and extend; they are taut, elaborate, world-building, reaching out to the other - to the limits of otherness in experience and language - before springing back to expose something intimately known or wholly surprising; they are 'springy with the possibilities of encounter'. In these essays, letters, reports, echoes, fables, explorations of faith, Capildeo moves beyond the grasp of political and ecological violence, even as they bear witness to its various forms. These are missives big and small, clear and sticky. 'The memory of having read a book,' writes Capildeo (paraphrasing the woman who ran the bead shop near Helmsley), 'is like kissing with synaesthesia.' That, too, is the experience of reading this book: senses are mingled, solitudes joined, and certainties confounded.'Will Harris 'These are literary dispatches from a brilliant mind. Early in Masqueraders, Capildeo writes, "This report comes to you from a little blue room of birds," perfectly and beautifully describing the territories of place, solidarities, and ineffability that these sparklingly wrought sentences inhabit. With breathtaking erudition, stunning observations of the worlds of the world we live in, each paragraph is a new turn on the materiality of language or what Capildeo calls "the shared technology of the imagination." In the end, "You don't even know what breathing is."'
Dionne Brand
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Manchester
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Carcanet Press Ltd
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 135 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-80017-569-3 (9781800175693)
Copyright in bibliographic data is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or its licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
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).
Jeremy Noel-Tod studied at New College, Oxford and now teaches at the University of East Anglia. In 2004, he founded Landfill, a poetry pamphlet press, and became an Associate Editor of Eggbox Publishing. He regularly reviews for the Times Literary Supplement and the Daily Telegraph.
Jeremy Noel-Tod studied at New College, Oxford and now teaches at the University of East Anglia. In 2004, he founded Landfill, a poetry pamphlet press, and became an Associate Editor of Eggbox Publishing. He regularly reviews for the Times Literary Supplement and the Daily Telegraph.