'Immeasurable as One': Vahni Capildeo’s Prose Poetics

The work of the Trinidadian British writer Vahni Capildeo has repeatedly employed prose as a poetic form. Noel-Tod reads two of Capildeo’s major prose sequences – ‘The Monster Scrapbook’ (2003) and ‘Person Animal Figure’ (2005) – in the light of her own critical statements, including her resistance to the expectation that a Caribbean writer living in Britain must be a postcolonial ‘documentary witness’. For Capildeo, prose poetry in the experimental tradition of Baudelaire represents a formal and linguistic continuum through which to explore the continuum of experience: the ‘indivisible’ nature of verse and prose are ‘changes of modality’ in one text, and the multiplicity of identities in her prose poetry present a model of lyric selfhood that expands the definition of both the ‘human’ and the ‘poetic’.