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The Disappearances
Startlingly original, one can see Vijay Seshadri’s The Disappearances as a combination of wit, creative use of language and his unbridled intelligence. This extraordinary collection is a compilation of two books, Wild Kingdom (1996) and The Long Meadow (2004), exploring diverse aspects of human existence. The poems in Wild Kingdom are structured around a broad array of reflective ideas: human dislocation as in The Refugee who is "pinned like a flower on the genocidal past"; the awful predicament of a driver stuck in a forest in Lifeline; strips of superfluous identity to discover the primal, where "the signature stinks and blood trails of man". His ingenuity can be captured with unmatched intensity in number of insightful poems as in The Testimonies of Ramon Fernandez, "I know its right/ to put the pedal to my appetite/until I hear the engine roar" or somewhere else in which the speaker says of an estranged friend that "he won’t answer my letters/his ink is frozen and he can’t forgive". The Long Meadow, for which he was awarded the prestigious James Laughlin award from the academy of American poets, gracefully embraces life from a fresh perspective. The poems are subtle and intense, marked by abiding concerns: feeling of compassion in Survivor; embracing of mankind ‘though diverse’ have something in common’ in A Fable; a healing effect of the title poem The Disappearance; inventive use of the language in poems like Aphasia and Baby Baby. He invites the reader in his personal world to share a memory, event or emotion: "I have the eyes to wait for you" in the love poem, The Painted Thing. The book also contains a prose memoir, The Nature of the Chemical Bond, which amusingly looks at issues like immigration, generation gap, the American Civil War, travel, and Indian mythology. This collection ends with a sharp and sensitive turns of a long narrative poem, The Long Meadow. This arresting collection comes like a breath of fresh air. At times slackness slinks in, but his persuasive voice has power to make this poetic route fascinating with remarkable sensitivity, instinctive empathy and high imagination.
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HERE
is a voice ‘gracefully contemporary’ looking into and through our
troubled world with the best of a rare sensibility.