Avidya
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
Joint Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2025
The poems in this collection emerged from journeys of great personal significance, and out of a migrant sensibility tied to three different countries: Sri Lanka, the UK and the USA. Sensuous, droll, yearning, they consider otherwise forgotten (ignored, repressed, erased) events.
In 2017, Vidyan Ravinthiran travelled to the north of Sri Lanka where his parents grew up – it finally felt safe – visiting war-torn Tamil areas overwritten by a tourist focus on the sun-spoiled South. In 2020, he, his wife and their one-year-old moved from Britain to the United States, months before the pandemic hit and the travel ban separated them for almost two years from family overseas.
Avidya is a political and a spiritual collection, whose multiple poetic forms, open and closed, are shaped by myth and philosophy, and by Sri Lankan as well as global crises. It is also a book about the forms of both strength and fear that parents pass on to their children.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
