Vahni Capildeo was born in Trinidad in 1973. She has lived in the UK since 1991 and was awarded a doctorate from Oxford University in 2001. The most recent of her seven collections, Measures of Expatriation (Carcanet 2016), won the Forward Prize. ‘Narcissus’ is from her first collection, No Traveller Returns (Salt 2003). It is the second poem in a sequence of four entitled ‘Silence Poem’. Capildeo explains that each of these poems ‘has silence at its core, because, ancient traditions are ultimately unknowable to us’. She has also said that, as a child in multicultural Trinidad, she ‘believed the Greek gods and heroes…really existed. They still feel personal to me, not abstract.’
1 In what ways does the poem resemble a sonnet? How does its sonnet-like form contribute to its meaning and effects?
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