I possibly admire the prose of the poet Anthony Vahni Capildeo more than that of any living writer. Its poised, inquisitive sentences inhabit a capacious space between essay, poem, drama and tale, where no stray perception is too small to pin precisely (“a table of dieted elegance”) and no connection too great to make in one leap. In late 2020, I ran an outdoor poetry reading group for our MA Creative Writing students as a supplement to the limited in-person teaching allowed by Covid rules. The prose fiction students were just as wowed as the poets by “The Fan Museum”, for the way that it shades imperceptibly between documentary and dream, describing a place that “dissolves”, as does the speaker, whose asides about stillness, travel and the Caribbean counterpoint this meticulous description of a “house in Scandinavia”. Falling asleep, the narrator literally collapses, like one of the fans they have been admiring: “First my feet folded one on to the other, soles partly touching; the seams of my legs twisted and relaxed, clasped into position like an enchanted dress gone back into a nutshell”. But the extraordinary then ends simply and innocently, as if signing a postcard: “I was glad to visit the Museum of Fans”.

First published in Measures of Expatriation, Carcanet, 2016