The Long Meadow: Poems - Hardcover

Seshadri, Vijay

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1555974007 ISBN 13: 9781555974008

Publisher: Graywolf Press, 2004

Synopsis

The extraordinary second collection by Vijay Seshadri, winner of the 2003 James
Laughlin award of The Academy of American Poets

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

Vijay Seshadri's first collection of poems, Wild Kingdom, was celebrated as one of the most exciting debuts in years. In The Long Meadow, Seshadri presents a brilliant array of formally inventive and emotionally powerful new poems in which the poet's wit and vivacity are poised against the alarming complexities of human experience. Through disparate forms and strategies, from the long narrative and the brief rhyming lyric to the prose meditation, The Long Meadow looks into and through our troubled world with a poetic sensibility that transforms history into metaphysics and disaster into possibility. Here is the voice of one of contemporary poetry's new masters.

About this title

About the Author

Vijay Seshadri is the author of Wild Kingdom. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Best American Poetry. Born in India, he lives in India and Brooklyn, New York.

From Publishers Weekly

Following the emotional subtlety and lyrical intensity of his widely-acclaimed debut, Wild Kingdom, Seshadri's new work engages sentimental and grandiose forms of fable and popular characterization. In several poems imbued with nursery rhyme, fantasy, fairy tale and cartoon, Seshadri takes on well-worn cultural icons: the Wicked Witch, the Three Little Pigs and Superman, to name a few. The poems generally lack the kind of fresh perspective found, say, in Anne Sexton's retellings of fairy tales. Here, Superman is bound by simple, inescapable duty (not to mention an ironclad rhyme scheme): "I can't stay away./ I have to fly down/ to watch them pray,// to watch them couple,/ to watch them fight,/ exposing myself/ to their kryptonite." Elsewhere, Seshadri relies on gimmicky forms (the "Interview," the "Lecture") to structure voice-driven poems: "Moving on to the next slide, / we can see, twisted and deliberately coarsened as it is,/ the exact same theme..." An extended section of prose memoir switches gears, using his father's obsession with the Civil War ( and the family's long road trips to famous battle sites) to evoke the complexities of the immigrant experience (Seshadri's own family came from Bangalore to the Midwest) as well as the intricacies of family relations. Particularly poignant is the son's fierce protectiveness of the father: "The passage to America had, happily for him, thrown him free, but it had also stripped him down to his naked soul. Almost to this day, like the sons of Noah, I have longed to walk backward and cover up the nakedness, the drunkenness of his intellectual obsessions, his naked, unheard-of obsessions..." This character is the most real of the book.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1555974007
• ISBN 13: 9781555974008
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 72