Facts for Visitors: Poems
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"In this altogether brilliant collection, the various but carefully sequenced (and deeply consequential) poems unfold in a world undergoing eclipse. It is a transient, unsettling, and fascinating phenomenon, the casting of shadows by shadows (of experience, literature, language, the natural sun) traveling across the totality of the known world: here. The process does not produce negation. It is, on the contrary, an odd plus. And the darkness is never complete; it is surprised into perceptibility by sources of counter-illumination, among them wit, intelligence, and, above all (as underlying all), love."—Lyn Hejinian"Reddy's book is new, utterly confident, clear, true to itself. It is about any world in which any one of us in love can learn something about what has happened to us—a world utterly and deeply known: ecstatic and forlorn. This is also a confident guide to our best life and to the language of that unknown place in which we bring to mind for the first time what we think and feel. At the end, Reddy's book leaves us with a deeper understanding of the wisdom of all good guides and poets: 'Where one goes, one goes alone.'"—Allen Grossman, Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Johns Hopkins University and author of Sweet Youth"The present is a word for only those words which I am now saying" writes Reddy in this profoundly moving first collection. And, indeed, a search for the nature of the 'present' continuously animates this stunning, anguished yet level-headed attempt to reconstruct a history of our kind as if from some as-yet unknown vantage point. Striving for a complex objectivity, the book explodes prior notions of orientation—geographic, historical, cultural—and recovers from the debris a profoundly trustworthy reorientation, political as well as emotional. Reddy speaks to us fully self-conscious and, strangely, fully innocent. It is a mesmerizing voice."—Jorie GrahamPublishers WeeklyIf mid-century mannerist verse seemed to take a hiatus after the '60s, its retooled comeback continues in Facts for Visitors by Srikanth Reddy. The destination is a familiar place that features at least eight Dantean "Circles," the first of which contains the apostrophe "We have done no wrong,/ my friends, & yet we find ourselves soiled,/ sold, carbonized teeth in a moss-riven jar." How to break out? "When it gets lonely, I sit by the river & read. Correction. There is no river. Mostly, I read." Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Speaking in the wake of empire, of terrestrial love, and of the collapse of traditional literary forms, the protagonist of this collection of poetry reconstructs a world from the language of encyclopedias, instruction manuals, and the literary legacies of Wallace Stevens, W. G. Sebald, and Joseph Conrad. Mobilizing traditional literary forms such as terza rima and the villanelle while simultaneously exploring the poetics of prose and other "formless" modes, Facts for Visitors re-negotiates the impasse between traditional and experimental approaches to writing.
