Wild Kingdom: Poems - Softcover

Seshadri, Vijay

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1555972365 ISBN 13: 9781555972363

Publisher: Graywolf Press, 1996

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

Vijay Seshadri is a poet of street scenes and seascapes, twisted alder stumps and spawning salmon, as well as drive-by shootings and thumping reggae bass. In Wild Kingdom he goes in search of the primordial face behind the civilized mask, the place where "wolfpacks of nothingness stalk / the signature stinks and blood trails of man." He doesn't have far to 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. "All this 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 is as pervasive as myth, and just as annihilating.

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

From the Back Cover:

"Vijay Seshadri's poems are wittily alive to everything, continually quick and surprising, expertly turned."--Richard Wilbur

"Vijay Seshadri tracks 'the signature stinks and blood trails' of our species--its squalor and splendor, seen here with both charity and rage--exhilaratingly in this book. The poems have both electric energy and gravitas. Short and long poems (which is rare) equally have authority. The distinction with which this new voice deciphers the 'Rosetta stone' of our 'defective mythologies' is unmistakable, and absorbing."--Frank Bidart

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.

"These are poems full of musical light and dark wit. Their cadences are wonderfully poised between regret and discovery. Vijay Seshadri is a lyric poet who can mix elegy and affirmation within a few stanzas of one another. He makes the landscape and the cityscape into one challenging and heartbreaking place where the old transformations of language can still happen."--Eaven Boland

Vijay Seshadri was born in India and came to America at age five. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio. His work has appeared in the Threepenny Review, the New Yorker, Shenandoah, Antaeus, and AGNI.

About this edition

• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 1555972365
• ISBN 13: 9781555972363
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 68