Vijay Seshadri's Latest 'Mesmerizes'

At the New York Times, David Orr reviews Vijay Seshadri's new poetry collection, That Was Now, This Is Then (Graywolf Press), which "mesmerizes" in its lyric dexterity. "The essence of Seshadri’s writing is conversation," Orr writes, "and that conversation is coiling and liquid, not diffident." Further: 

Seshadri is fluent in an unusually wide range of forms — he ranges here from rhymed quatrains to fat blocks of prose — and his voice is typically chatty, probing, importuning, self-mocking. As in the beginning of “Meeting (Thick)”:

I’ll meet if you really want to meet.
I’ll even meet in some small café or some
park across the way. But I won’t meet for long,
and not for a minute will I look at you in your isolation,
your human isolation. Looking at yours makes me look at mine —
transparencies of each other are they, yours and mine —
and I don’t have time for mine, so how could I have time for yours?

He’s a poet who mesmerizes not by stillness but by zigs and zags, and he very much wants to take the reader with him as he island hops from idea to idea. Here’s the beginning of “To the Reader,” which seems fair to take as a statement of his poetics:

I’m writing this so I can tell you that what you’re thinking
about me is exactly what I’m thinking
about you.

What you’re reading is exactly what you’re writing,
by the light of a taper, deep inside yourself,
at your walnut secretary.

Seshadri goes on to compare this intertwining to “spooky action at a distance,” which is Einstein’s somewhat skeptical description of quantum entanglement (basically, the idea that in certain systems, changing one particle will change its counterpart, even if far away). The suggestion is that the reader-writer-poem relationship is similarly entangled — and since this idea is being expressed in a poem itself, the result is something like a ball of yarn inside a ball of yarn.

Continue reading at the New York Times.