Customer Reviews

The Long Meadow: Poems

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Vijay Seshadri's The Long Meadow is to be enjoyed and admired on many levels: the poems manage to tap into a universal that can be held only in the finely specific; there is a sense of timelessness joined to a burning present; and a highly developed sense of irony which often acts as a kind of veiled entrance into the deeply sensitive. Sometimes, it is only after reading Vijay Seshadri's poems a couple of times that the form becomes apparent, so subtle and fine is his ear. And after the form emerges, the meaning only deepens. When I think of the relationship between form and meaning, a beautiful poem of his called "Anima" comes to mind, in which he imagines his lost "other", and himself as "her quizzical, her other,/ her bitter, prodigal, absconded half./ Where, just where, am I that I can never come back?". In Vijay Seshadri's poems, form and meaning act, in a way, as though they were two such entities that he often, it feels, quite miraculously unites. I think of the rather heartbreaking poem, "Aphasia", which also appeared in a recent New Yorker. The form so subtly mirrors the disease: the rhymed couplets are contained by the unrhymed first and last lines of the stanzas, as though the brain were losing its order from the outside in, or, that the order could no longer be released from the already disintegrating surface where brain meets outer world, human being communicates with human being.

Aphasia

His signs flick off.
His names of birds
and his beautiful words -
eleemosynary, fir, cinerarium, reckless -
skip like pearls from a snapped necklace
scattering over linoleum.

His thinking won't
venture out of his mouth.
His grammar heads south.
Pathetic his subjunctives; just as pathetic
his mangling the emphatic enclitic
he was once the master of.

Still, all in all, he has
his inner weather of pure meaning,
though the wind is keening
through his Alps and his clouds hang low
and the forecast is "Rain mixed with snow,
heavy at times."

There is too, the stunning love poem, "The Painted Things": "One hour isn't enough for the bangle on your wrist,/ one day for your jewel-encrusted breastplate./ One night dies/ expecting your velvet garter. ... because I have eyes slow enough for you,/ I have eyes to wait for you".

There is a Whitmanesque embracing of humankind in many of the poems. I note only "A Fable". There is a story about a boy, the boy's future wife, the boy's father, and a donkey. The poem talks about all humans having come from this one boy; in essence, that we all "though diverse and ignorant / of one another, though pressed like grapes / through the bewildering human genotypes" have something in common. There are too the father and son writings, both with poet as son and poet as father, which have both a powerful specificity and a deeply moving universality and humanity. And of course, "The Disappearances", the poem which so many found healing to read in the New Yorker just after the tragedy of 9/11.

I was delighted by this book! And it seems clear to me that Seshadri delighted in writing it. His range and sense of play -- his capacity for wit and irony on the one-hand (particularly in the longer, fairytale inspired poems), and exquisite tenderness on the other (in the shorter lyrics) -- kept me fully engaged the whole way through. Especially rewarding were the poems where Seshadri dared to write out of more personal material-- about his son, fatherhood, married love. In these, he delivers a one-two punch, bringing to bear his unfailing attention to craft and a willingness to explore emotional territory that is at once grounded in the daily and rife with mythic overtones. I go back again and again to these poems. Here is a poet who has reached a magnificent stride, and we are all the beneficiaries.

I was excited to read The Long Meadow, as I have been hearing all about Seshadri. I was vastly disappointed in this book, however. The language was flat. There was little emotional base. The work was also not daring or innovative, as I was led to believe in the jacket quotes from the likes of Lux and McGrath. Some poems like the "Survivor" have few images and are really cliche. Many of the poems are cliche like this one are driven by the form of the poem, more than anything else. Some of the like "stepped off the ledge in despair" and "who had the sense to duck" seem forced because of the necessity to rhyme:

Survivior

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

its substance out on the killing floor
or flatlined in intensive care
or vanished after school
or stepped off the ledge in despair.

Of all those you started with,
only you are still around;

only you have not been listed with
the defeated and the drowned.

So how could you ever win our respect?--
you, who had the sense to duck,
you, with your strength almost intact
and all your good luck.

Reading a recent poem in the New Yorker by Vijay Seshadri, Thought Problem, I picked up The Long Meadow with long expectations. Unfortunately, this collection of poems has little punch. Seshadri does nothing new with language; the words he uses, the choice of language, the pacing, has little sense of drama or urgency. The topics he explores do not break new thematic ground. All and all, this collection is flat and uninspiring. A disappointing effort, this book leaves the reader wondering why this should be read; and why this was published at all.