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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Praise for Ravi Shankar's Instrumentality, May 13, 2004
"Instrumentality plays expectations and delivers uncanny reformulations that seem "predestined, in retrospect." Rave Shaker's poems are filled with the pleasure of subjects dissolving into ideas, ideas folding into sounds, and sounds echoing familiar but elusive translocations. "
-Charles Bernstein "Quirky, quizzical, inquisitive, Ravi Shankar in Instrumentality goes in quest of what the oddness of language and imagination can reveal: "a hush of atoms holding a planet together." By turns, lyrical and meditative, these poems are guided by a strong intelligence toward resolutions that are both surprising and apt."
-Gregory Orr "A New Confessions of Zeno, this time in verse. Topics most of us brood over in private are here brought out into daylight by an analyst clad in bullet-proof unembarrassment. Ravi Shankar is a comic tragedian of philosophic collisions that occur at the intersection of memory, desire, perception, mutability, and language. Wild swoops made on the rheostat of diction and intricate consonantal echolocation enable the invention of this poet's analogue for the metamorphic nature of what is past, or passing, or to come."
-Alfred Corn "Ravi Shankar's poems are immortal in the flesh, finding in the life of the mind--its interpretations, its "instrumentality"--the surpassing, transient lyrical moment; and in the life of the world's body the permanent, unflinching presence of thought, unconfined by time or space. They are the verbal artifacts of a singular, many-sided, and distinguished consciousness."
-Vijay Seshadri "This is a very special first book. Ravi Shankar's poems have a fine tuned sense of form, a rare delight in language. Through wit and abstraction they reveal a metaphysics of longing, binding us to the elements of our moving world."
-Meena Alexander "Here are poems I've not seen before. A fog lifts and Ravi Shankar gives the reader a landscape of language filled with sharp, stainless, geometric forms. There is considerable distance to travel from page to page. Even in a poem like "Home Together" Shankar detects a vacuum in love. From a men's room to a San Francisco sunrise, Shankar emerges with a pocketful of koans reflecting the wisdom hidden in the stars."
- E. Ethelbert Miller "Lovers of poetry will find in Ravi Shankar's INSTRUMENTALITY the lucky serendipity one hopes for in a new poet: an original voice. The poems take their origin as does all fine poetry, in a love of language and a metaphorical vision combined with the imperative of music. Below the shimmering surface, however, currents of Indian spirituality and western philosophy draw the reader deeper into the works - a serious dialectic playing out in the soul of a sensitive young man pondering life's mysteries, large and small. The old questions take on a freshness and interest when seen through the new eyes of a poet of such complexity. Other times, the work is more playful. Like Wallace Stevens or the metaphysical poets, his conceits sing with intelligence, wit, and the intricacies of extended metaphor. Coming away from the work, one thinks of the jewel-encrusted coat of a raja or a wizard - a pun comes to mind: Ravishing. In a long poem celebrating the launching of the space shuttle Discovery, th poet says, "I feel as though a part of us has lifted off." And so it is for the reader of this fine collection of poems."
-Richard Harteis "In the stunning title poem of Instrumentality, Shankar writes of "action's unstuttering arc which is eloquence and muteness at once." That idea expresses what I find in this collection, for here poems becomes performatives that enacts their totality in the tension between graceful expression and silence. Shankar is a deeply philosophical poet who explores the major questions while attuned to the flux that is the very stuff of existence, and does so while moving from place to place-Illinois, Florida, Mumbai, Monteverde, and Hell's Kitchen-a Spiderman of the imagination. And, in terms of tone, there's no cynicism or irony here, rather the pleasures of varied vocabularies and deft juxtapositions ajumble on multiple levels. One senses the sheen of a new poetry."
-Gray Jacobik
author of Brave Disguises
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