Avidya

The marvelous, shape-shifting latest from Ravinthiran (after The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here) features poems of relocation and dislocation, cataloging the struggle to acclimatize while refusing bland truisms. A blending of cultures and landscapes—British, Sri Lankan, North American—creates moments of imagistic fusion in lines full of nuance about the complications of experience: “otherness is something/ they’ll never get their heads around.” These poems are also suffused with the speaker’s self-accusation and refusal to seem more valiant than necessary, even when “Fancying himself/ an action hero walking in slow-motion.” Instead, they seek to capture a life beset by hyper-alertness: “I stayed behind// with my wrongdoing and the exordium/ to this dire this everlasting vigilance.” Ravinthiran writes about his son—“I can’t be still/ the centre of the universe/ how do I make it/ all about him?”—while admitting the geopolitical ruptures and cataclysms he is unwilling to ignore: “between one/ set of murderers and another,/ a shot mother/ dropped her baby/ in the lagoon.” History and the domestic clash within an expansive literary heritage: “from our kitchen the time-travelling smell/ of chicken curry floats to Walden Pond.” Allusive, musical, studied yet tender, this is a wonder. (June)