Twenty years ago, the poet, essayist and playwright Claudia Rankine, hailed for Citizen – an original, unnerving and unforgettable scrutiny of racism in the US and winner of the 2015 Forward prize – was involved in a more inward undertaking. She had been reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse – and Woolf seems to have become for her, as happens to many readers, a muse of sorts. In the novel, there is a point at which Woolf’s Mrs Ramsay revels in a mind at liberty, “free for the strangest adventures” and observes: “When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless.” Rankine’s own project is about the imagined limits to that freedom. Her narrator is pregnant, uncertain whether to become a mother. Rankine was aware Woolf had decided against having children because of mental instability and her narrator wonders whether a mother and an artist can be expected to coexist. Plot is an arresting curiosity: an embattled, intense, extended prose poem, published in the UK for the first time.
