This week’s poem is a polka-dot pet blanket of a sonnet – the sonnet as a very gifted, Latin-learned pet might worry at it. To quote the publisher’s blurb for Venus as a Bear, Capildeo writes “on animals, art, language, the sea, thinghood, metaphor, description and dance”. In fact, all her poems represent her engagement with language: it’s one of the reasons they form such a stimulating “reader space”. But “pet” is a loaded word, and it also asserts the distance of speaker from subject. S/he “walks wilder walks further / downriver from calling calling owner predator”.

Source: The Guardian May 21, 2018 07:52 UTC