The Long Meadow: Poems (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "Tall and plural and parallel, their buff, excited skins of glass pressed to glass and steel bronzed by the falling sun, the city's figmentary buildings..." (more)

Editorial Reviews

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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From The New Yorker

Seshadri's second collection is gracefully contemporary—"Superman Agonistes" is the title of one poem—and effortlessly ranges from Russian Church history to Rocky and Bullwinkle. The book centers on a short prose essay about the obsession of his father, an Indian immigrant, with the American Civil War. A scientist, his father is skeptical of "hidden and untenable assumptions" and dismissive of his poet son's suggestion of parallels with the fratricidal war in the Mahabharata—"The Mahabharata is just a story." Now a father himself, Seshadri wonders what wisdom he has to impart to his own son and wittily dissects "The Three Little Pigs." He reflects, "The Christians say / the story of the universe is the story of a boy and his dad. / They are absolutely right."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 72 pages
• Publisher: Graywolf Press; First edition. edition (May 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1555974007
• ISBN-13: 978-1555974008
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #971,713 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Universality in the Particular, June 23, 2004

By	sally Bliumis (Armonk, New York United States) - See all my reviews

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.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wish I Had Written This, June 26, 2004

By A Customer

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.

3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Totally overrated, June 7, 2004

By A Customer

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.