Product Description

Customer Reviews (4)

Nothing special is done with language
Reading a recent poem in the New Yorker by Vijay Seshadri, Thought Problem, I picked up The Long Meadow with long expectations.Unfortunately, this collection of poems has little punch.Seshadri does nothing new with language; the words he uses, the choice of language, the pacing, has little sense of drama or urgency.The topics he explores do not break new thematic ground.All and all, this collection is flat and uninspiring.A disappointing effort, this book leaves the reader wondering why this should be read; and why this was published at all.

Wish I Had Written This
I was delighted by this book!And it seems clear to me that Seshadri delighted in writing it.His range and sense of play-- his capacity for wit and irony on the one-hand (particularly in the longer, fairytale inspired poems), and exquisite tenderness on the other (in the shorter lyrics) -- kept me fully engaged the whole way through.Especially rewarding were the poems where Seshadri dared to write out of more personal material-- about his son, fatherhood, married love.In these, hedelivers a one-two punch, bringing to bear his unfailing attention to craft and a willingness to explore emotional territory that is at once grounded in the daily and rife with mythic overtones.I go back again and again to these poems.Here is a poet who has reached a magnificent stride, and we are all the beneficiaries.

Universality in the Particular
Vijay Seshadri's The Long Meadow is to be enjoyed and admired on many levels: the poems manage to tap into a universal that can be held only in the finely specific; there is a sense of timelessness joined to a burning present; and a highly developed sense of irony which often acts as a kind of veiled entrance into the deeply sensitive. Sometimes, it is only after reading Vijay Seshadri's poems a couple of times that the form becomes apparent, so subtle and fine is his ear. And after the form emerges, the meaning only deepens. When I think of the relationship between form and meaning, a beautiful poem of his called "Anima" comes to mind, in which he imagines his lost "other", and himself as "her quizzical, her other,/ her bitter, prodigal, absconded half./ Where, just where, am I that I can never come back?". In Vijay Seshadri's poems, form and meaning act, in a way, as though they were two such entities that he often, it feels, quite miraculously unites. I think of the rather heartbreakingpoem, "Aphasia", which also appeared in a recent New Yorker. The form so subtly mirrors the disease: the rhymed couplets are contained by the unrhymed first and last lines of the stanzas, as though the brain were losing its order from the outside in, or, that the order could no longer be released from the already disintegrating surface where brain meets outer world, human being communicates with human being.

Aphasia

His signs flick off.
His names of birds
and his beautiful words -
eleemosynary, fir, cinerarium, reckless -
skip like pearls from a snapped necklace
scattering over linoleum.

His thinking won't
venture out of his mouth.
His grammar heads south.
Pathetic his subjunctives; just as pathetic
his mangling the emphatic enclitic
he was once the master of.

Still, all in all, he has
his inner weather of pure meaning,
though the wind is keening
through his Alps and his clouds hang low
and the forecast is "Rain mixed with snow,
heavy at times."

There is too, the stunning love poem, "The Painted Things": "One hour isn't enough for the bangle on your wrist,/ one day for your jewel-encrusted breastplate./ One night dies/ expecting your velvet garter. ... because I have eyes slow enough for you,/ I have eyes to wait for you".

There is a Whitmanesque embracing of humankind in many of the poems. I note only "A Fable". There is a story about a boy, the boy's future wife, the boy's father, and a donkey. The poem talks about all humans having come from this one boy; in essence, that we all "though diverse and ignorant / of one another, though pressed like grapes / through the bewildering human genotypes" have something in common. There are too the father and son writings, both with poet as son and poet as father, which have both a powerful specificity and a deeply moving universality and humanity. And of course, "The Disappearances", the poem which so many found healing to read in the New Yorker just after the tragedy of 9/11.

Totally overrated
I was excited to read The Long Meadow, as I have been hearing all about Seshadri.I was vastly disappointed in this book, however.The language was flat.There was little emotional base.The work was also not daring or innovative, as I was led to believe in the jacket quotes from the likes of Lux and McGrath.Some poems like the "Survivor" have few images and are really cliche.Many of the poems are cliche like this one are driven by the form of the poem, more than anything else.Some of the like "stepped off the ledge in despair" and "who had the sense to duck" seem forced because of the necessity to rhyme:

Survivior

We hold it against you that you survivied.
People better than you are dead,
but you still punch the clock.
Your body has wizened but has not bled

its substance out on the killing floor
or flatlined in intensive care
or vanished after school
or stepped off the ledge in despair.

Of all those you started with,
only you are still around;

only you have not been listed with
the defeated and the drowned.

So how could you ever win our respect?--
you, who had the sense to duck,
you, with your strength almost intact
and all your good luck. ... Read more

Product Description
Wild Kingdom marks the debut of an audacious new voice in American poetry. Vijay Seshadri's poems inhabit the crossroads of history and wilderness, the imaginative realm where fir and alder trees share a common life with reggae bands, refugees, office buildings, and speeding traffic.
Amazon.com Review
Vijay Seshadri is a poet of street scenes and seascapes, twisted alderstumps and spawning salmon, as well as drive-by shootings and thumpingreggae bass. In Wild Kingdom he goes in search of the primordialface behind the civilized mask, the place where "wolfpacks of nothingnessstalk / the signature stinks and blood trails of man." He doesn't have farto travel. Whether his subject is the "ancient terror" of marriage, in"Prothalamion," or a northwester "glittering with malice" in "The Lump,"Seshadri seems peculiarly subject to powers both old and inexorable. "Allthis was the brainchild of water," as the lost hiker of "Lifeline"realizes, and throughout Wild Kingdom groundwater rises in crevices,polar icecaps melt, and rain wears its passage through rock. Nature here isas pervasive as myth, and just as annihilating.

Yet not all is Sturm und Drang: witness the joyous "Big Mama!" thatends a stanza of the prehistoric love poem "My Esmeralda," or the ebullientvoice of God in "An Oral History of Migration": "You be that thing, Hesaid." Making use of long, conversational lines as well as meticulousrhymes, Seshadri's voice is elegant, energetic, and startlinglyoriginal--who else would say of a refugee that he is "pinned like a floweron the genocidal past"? "I can see by your faces that / your hearts aregood, and like to think / mine is, too," he writes in "The Testimonies ofRamon Fernandez. As the rest of the poem tells us, we should believe him,stand back, and let him work. --Mary Park ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Stunning Debut
It is difficult reading this book to believe this is, in fact, the poet's first collection.Seshadri has a confidence one usually finds among the seasoned poet.He writes with a simplicity of style that could only be labelled elegant.How refreshing that this "elegance" is used to relate and describe such things as the cityscape of urban america and reggae bands while in another instance it is capturing the details of the local flora.It is easy now to understand how Mr. Seshadri placed his poems in such prestigious magazines as ANTAEUS, THE NEW YORKER, and THE PARIS REVIEW.His poems are well-made, and that is one of the highest compliments I can pay a poet.I will certainly be on the lookout for his poems as they appear in magaiznes in the future.//C. Dale Young, Associate Editor of NEW ENGLAND REVIEW ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from American Scholar, published by Phi Beta Kappa Society on September 22, 2004. The length of the article is 1540 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Numerologies.
Author: Vijay Seshadri
Publication: American Scholar (Refereed)
Date: September 22, 2004
Publisher: Phi Beta Kappa Society
Volume: 73Issue: 4Page: 93(4)

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Product Description
This digital document is an article from American Scholar, published by Phi Beta Kappa Society on January 1, 2002. The length of the article is 3510 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Whitman's Triumph. (Books: rereading).
Author: Vijay Seshadri
Publication: American Scholar (Refereed)
Date: January 1, 2002
Publisher: Phi Beta Kappa Society
Volume: 71Issue: 1Page: 136(5)

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Product Description
This digital document is an article from American Scholar, published by Phi Beta Kappa Society on March 22, 2001. The length of the article is 7065 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Which Side Are You On, Boys?
Author: Vijay Seshadri
Publication: American Scholar (Refereed)
Date: March 22, 2001
Publisher: Phi Beta Kappa Society
Volume: 70Issue: 2Page: 49

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Product Description
This digital document is an article from Poetry, published by Modern Poetry Association on September 1, 2004. The length of the article is 750 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Dust and tales and time.(Comment)(Book Review)
Author: Kate Bernheimer
Publication: Poetry (Refereed)
Date: September 1, 2004
Publisher: Modern Poetry Association
Volume: 184Issue: 5Page: 385(2)

Article Type: Book Review

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