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Book launch: Like A Tree Walking by Vahni Capildeo

1 December, 2021 at 7 p.m.

By Carcanet Press

Online event celebrating the launch of Like a Tree, Walking by Vahni Capildeo, the 2021 Poetry Book Society Winter Choice. Hosting the reading will be fellow Carcanet poet Padraig Regan, joining Vahni to discuss the new book. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. The text will be shown during readings so that you can read along.

Register for Zoom Event

Vahni Capildeo’s ‘Like a Tree, Walking’ is a fresh departure, even for this famously innovative poet. Taking its title from a story of sight miraculously regained, this book draws on Capildeo’s interest in ecopoetics and silence. Many pieces originate in specific places, from nocturnes and lullabies in hilly Port of Spain to ‘stillness exercises’ recording microenvironments – emotional and aural – around English trees. These journeys offer a configuration of the political that makes a space for new kinds of address, declaration and relation.

Capildeo takes guidance from vernacular traditions of sensitivity ranging from Thomas A Clark and Iain Crichton Smith to the participants in a Leeds libraries project on the Windrush. Like a Tree, Walking is finally a book defined by how it writes love.

Registration for this online event will cost £2, later redeemable against the cost of the book. All attendees will receive the discount code and how to purchase the book during and after event.

Please note that there is a limited number of places for the reading, so do book early to avoid disappointment. You should receive a confirmation email with details on how to join after you register. If this does not arrive, please get in touch. Please also be aware that clicking ‘attending’ on the Facebook event will not guarantee your place – you must complete Zoom Registration

About the speakers

Vahni (Anthony Ezekiel) Capildeo FRSL is a Trinidadian Scottish writer of poetry and non-fiction. Capildeo’s eight books and eight pamphlets include Like a Tree, Walking (Carcanet, November 2021) and The Dusty Angel (Oystercatcher, 2021). Interests include plurilingualism, traditional masquerade, and multidisciplinary collaboration. Writer in Residence and Professor at the University of York, a Visiting Scholar at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and an Honorary Student of Christ Church, Oxford.

Padraig Regan was born in 1993 in Belfast. Author of two poetry pamphlets: Delicious (Lifeboat, 2016) and Who Seemed Alive & Altogether Real (Emma Press, 2017). Debut collection, Some Integrity, is forthcoming with Carcanet in January 2022. In 2015, a recipient of an Eric Gregory Award. Holds a PhD on creative-critical and hybridised writing practices in medieval texts and the work of Anne Carson from the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University Belfast.

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