Description
Book SynopsisThe critic, poet, and scholar Vidyan Ravinthiran searches for alternatives to the standard models of writing about poetry, pursuing close, imaginative readings of a variety of authors. Discussing neglected writers and those well-known in the West, these essays are unabashedly passionate and subjective yet keenly analytical and investigative.
Trade ReviewWhat would an actually contemporary literary criticism sound like? This magisterial yet companionable book heralds the arrival of a major critical voice and prose stylist, a virtuoso modeling for us ‘styles of attention.’ Vidyan Ravinthiran brings to poetries in English his erudition, formal acuities, a passionately deprovincializing sensibility, political and ethical attunement, and stylistic panache. From Mir Taqi Mir to Thomas Hardy to Elizabeth Bishop to Srinivas Rayaprol, Ravinthiran surveys the territory and remakes it (to use imperial metaphors he would abjure). Impassioned, elegant, sometimes barbed, this is restless, startlingly illuminating criticism. In Ravinthiran, a poet as well as critic, the world-making and world-registering powers of poetry find a brilliant, vivifying advocate. -- Maureen N. McLane, author of
My PoetsRavinthiran is a rare critic: one whose deep-diving, finely wrought readings across multiple poetic traditions are dexterous as well as authoritative. He brings a poet’s enthusiasm for craft and language to a reevaluation of critical culture, speaking with great clarity and personality in a voice so capacious that we are compelled to listen, to learn. -- Sandeep Parmar, author of
Reading Mina Loy's Autobiographies: Myth of the Modern WomanVidyan Ravinthiran writes with readerly passion and intellectual commitment about poetry he loves, at once deeply expert and finely attuned to the pleasures of literary language. The range of authors he celebrates is as impressive as the critical imagination with which he celebrates them. His is a distinctive and memorable voice which speaks eloquently to readers both within and without the academy. -- Seamus Perry, editor of
Essays in CriticismVidyan Ravinthiran’s beautifully written, richly insightful collection is extraordinary in its geographic and cultural breadth, its incisive attention to form, its fusion of the strengths of journalistic and scholarly writing, and its chameleonic openness to, and close tracking of, the twists and turns of poetry. An eye-opening delight for poets and poetry readers. -- Jahan Ramazani, author of
Poetry in a Global AgeIncisive, reflective, illuminating. -- Jeremy Noel-Tod * Times Literary Supplement's Books of the Year *
Ravinthiran is a rare critical mind whose sovereignty lies in an inextinguishable curiosity and drive to read more deeply. His critical writing is also inexorably beautiful. -- Sandeep Parmar * The White Review, Books of the Year *
Probing and provoking, far-ranging but astringent, Ravinthiran would appear a natural successor to Michael Hofmann as a doyen of the long-form essay […] a steely and eye-opening book. -- David Wheatley * The Review of English Studies *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
“A slave and worshiper at love’s doorstep”: Mir Taqi Mir
Censorship and the Role of the Poet in the Work of Ana Blandiana
At Home or Nowhere: A. K. Ramanujan
Your Thorns Are the Best Part of You: Marianne Moore and Stevie Smith
Eunice de Souza and Indian Speech
“Emmental freedom”: Czesław Miłosz
“There must be something to say”: On Verse Sound
Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks, Communication, and Other People
Ted Hughes, Keith Sagar, and the Poetics of Letter Prose
Rae Armantrout’s Lonely Dream
Dreaming the World: Vinod Kumar Shukla’s Extraordinary Sentences
Srinivas Rayaprol and Gāmini Salgādo
You Can’t Close Your Eyes for a Sec: Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
Thom Gunn’s Shadows Hard as Board
Galway Kinnell, Trying to Become Winged
A. R. Ammons and “the political (read, human) world”
Postlyric and the Already Known: Dawn Lundy Martin
“I am not speaking of or as myself or for any/one”: Vahni (Anthony) Capildeo
Bibliography
Permissions
Index
