Publication News: Polka Dot Wounds

Anthony Vahni Capildeo's Polkadot Wounds (Carcanet, July 2024) continues Capildeo's concern with reading place, ranging over geographies and cultures. While Capildeo writes back to Dante's Commedia, refracted through pandemic silence, crisis, and excess, the book takes its title from the stones and carved wood of Launceston, Cornwall, where Capildeo was Writer in Residence with the Charles Causley Trust.  The late poet Charles Causley's home, Cyprus Well (where in the spring of 2022, much of Polkadot Wounds crystallized from materials gathered in the UK and elsewhere since 2017) is open for writer retreats. The marks of ordinary or wartime wear and tear on walls, and the recycling of stone from grand to humble buildings, connects us with the breathing, if wounded, collective body of locations ranging beyond Launceston and its martyr, St Cuthbert Mayne, to demolished Caribbean sites, and protected waters in Japan. Intense attention that moves away into stillness, and then moves back, is key to this book's creative-critical approach, as it reads place.