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The Long Meadow by Vijay Seshadri arrived on my desktop highly recom-
mended.
A panel comprised of Mary Jo Bang, Thom Gunn, and Campbell McGrath awarded
this book the 2003 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets.
Thomas Lux describes the poems as "brilliantly crafted" and "The New Yorker"
says they resound "with the high-frequency channels of consciousness and the
jazz of spoken language."
Seshadri has an affinity for Latinate vocabulary and the scholarly atmosphere
it evokes. In his poems, this intelligent language
bumps, in a sometimes discomfiting manner, into everyday vernacular.
Occasionally, this combination feels strained, as if the poet was attempting
to "talk down" to communicate with a "man-on-the-street" audience.
However, when the poet achieves a balance between the Latinate and every day
speech, the results can be delightful. His "Aphasia", for instance,
celebrates the beauty of complicated words while lamenting the speaker's
loss of ability to use them. "Lecture" is an interesting immersion in the
specific language of art. "Baby Baby" shows the poet in full control of the
language, in turn playful or suggestive and certainly precise. He also makes
good use of lists, as in these lines from "Baby Baby":
I was saying how difficult it is to be
courteous, loyal, thrifty,
brave, cheerful, obedient, and wise
separately, let alone all at once.
These poems are intelligent and well crafted, but at times seem to lack the
musicality that I find appealing. While there is no doubt that the poet
enjoys language, the poems seems to reflect more a love for the intrinsic
meaning of words than regard for the subtlety of sound. A few of the poems
tend to wander away from the central concept in a way that distracts. In
"Wolf Soup," as the speaker retells the Three Little Pigs story, he explores
tangentially the extermination of wolves and refers in passing to "the Last
Judgment of the Zoroastrians" in a section that does little to propel the
narrative.
He does employ other devices to good effect. In "Visiting Russia" phrasal repetitions, similar to repotia, acts as a framework for the poem. The structure is loosely reminiscent of a
pantoum and, like a pantoum, the individual phrases take a slightly
different import when repeated. The book also includes several poems that
utilize end-rhyme schemes. Worth particular note is "Tree," a poem written in
rhyming couplets that employs pacing eloquently suited to the subject.
This is a collection without any discernable cohesive thread. The book
contains poems that deal with childhood stories (fables, fairytales,
superheroes and cartoon characters) mixed with dramatic monologues, free
verse and formal, longer poems and even a 10-page prose selection that I
interpret as memoir.
I thoroughly enjoyed the prose piece "The Nature of the Chemical Bond", which is
a witty look at a family coping with the intersection of Indian and American
lifestyles and the generational gaps caused by the family members' differing
responses to these two cultures.
"We were strange. We were doubly strange: strange because
Indians are strange even in India, having been exiled from time and history
by an overdeveloped, supersaturated civilization, and strange also because
no one remotely resembling us had ever before lived where we lived. But I
was the only person in my family beset and burdened by this strangeness"
—from "The Nature of the
Chemical Bond"
Utilizing a style that, at times, seems unable to cohere in some
poems, his prose allows room for digression; he ties together seemingly
disparate threads in such a way that each informs the others. The selection
covers diverse subjects such as the American Civil War, the chemical bond of
the title, travel, Indian religious festivals, and even a list of Indian
groceries, all which come together to make this selection worth slating for
re-reading.
Surprisingly, there are a mere 25 poems in this book, which comprise 40 pages.
With so few poems included in the book, the failures and successes of individual poems are
magnified, perhaps disproportionately, making this selection less appealing
than a longer book might have been. Yet, with a suitably impressive vita
that includes publications in "The New Yorker", "The Paris Review", "The
Best American Poetry 2003", and as recipient of the prestigious James
Laughlin Award, Vijay Sheshadri has certainly made his voice heard
in the clamorous landscape of American poetry.
View three poems from The Long Meadow here
Poet's Biography:
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Vijay Seshadri is the author of Wild Kingdom. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and in Best American Poetry. He was born in India and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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