Tainted Pastoral: Poets Figuring City

This event will traverse what Anthony Vahni Capildeo has located in Karen Martinez’s film short Dark and Unaccustomed Words (2012) as “very often what you could call contaminated pastoral, or tainted pastoral” a tendency or style of ecopoetics also tried by two of these islands’ other innovative poets in their recent collections.  

Anthony Vahni Capildeo will be joined on stage by Padraig Regan and Lila Matsumoto for an evening of readings and conversation, hosted by Bebe Ashley.  

Anthony Vahni Capildeo FRSL is a Trinidadian Scottish writer of poetry and non-fiction. Anthony Vahni Capildeo's eight books and eight pamphlets include Like a Tree, Walking (Carcanet, November 2021) and The Dusty Angel (Oystercatcher, 2021). Their interests include plurilingualism, traditional masquerade, and multidisciplinary collaboration. They are 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 is the author of two poetry pamphlets: Delicious (Lifeboat, 2016) and Who Seemed Alive & Altogether Real (Emma Press, 2017). In 2015, they were a recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, and in 2020 they were awarded the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Prize. They hold 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, where they were a Ciaran Carson Writing and the City Fellow in 2021. This collection is the recipient of the 2021 Clarissa Luard Prize, awarded by the David Cohen Foundation.

Lila Matsumoto is a writer who works with music and art. Her poetry publications and pamphlets include Two Twin Pipes Sprout Water (Prototype, 2021), Urn & Drum (Shearsman, 2018) and Soft Troika (If a Leaf Falls Press, 2016) and Allegories from my Kitchen (Sad Press, 2015). She is in the bands Food People, Cloth, and Geranium Slips, and teaches creative writing and poetics at the University of Nottingham. Lila recently co-curated Pommel, an online programme of videos created by artists innovating at the intersection of textual, visual, and sonic performance.