Wild Kingdom

by Vijay Seshadri

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555972363
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	02/01/1996
Pages:	68
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 8.52(h) x 0.34(d)

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

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

“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

From the Publisher

The poems in Seshadri's first collection are held together by a common thread of human displacement. What does it mean to be displaced? In "The Refugee," it means resettling in an unknown land. In "Little Treasury of Best-Loved Lines," it means alienation from one's own province: "She lives alone in a condominium cluster,/ shingled in cedar, its courtyards/ defensible, its openings alarmed,/ built just recently on land/ where holsteins were once farmed." The poems' locations move slowly from city to country-beginning with "Made in the Tropics," in which residents of the Bronx gather in "fur-trimmed vans" to celebrate Jamaican Independence Day, and ending with the long final poem, "Lifeline," an account of a driver who has crashed his truck in a forest. Seshadri shows remarkable stylistic range. He's as comfortable with the quick, lucid tongue of "The Testimonies of Ramon Fernandez" ("I know it's right/ to put the pedal to my appetite/ until I here the engine roar") as he is with the somber tones of "The Language War," in which the speaker says of an alienated friend: "he won't answer my letters,/ His ink is frozen and he can't forgive." In portrayals that fluidly embrace abstraction and detail, Seshadri practices a formal precision that is as easy with sonnets as with free verse. In a compassionate, perceptive spirit, Seshadri offers us works that belong among, the broadest, most intelligent new poetry of this decade. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly