Vidyan Ravinthiran

Seni Seneviratne

Shash Trevett

This first ever anthology of Sri Lankan and diasporic poetry features over a hundred poets writing in English, or translated from Tamil and Sinhala. It brings to light a long-neglected national literature, and reshapes our understanding of migrational poetics and the poetics of atrocity. In this anthology, poets long out of print appear beside exciting new talents; works written in the country converse with poetry from the UK, the US, Canada and Australia. Poems in traditional and in open forms, concrete poems, spoken word poems, and experimental post-lyric hybrids of poetry and prose, appear with an introduction explaining Sri Lanka's history. Sri Lanka has thrilled the foreign imagination as a land of infinite possibility. Portuguese, Dutch and British colonisers envisioned an island of gems and pearls, a stopping-point on the Silk Road; tourists today are sold a vision of golden beaches and swaying palm trees, delicious food and smiling locals. This favours the south of the island over the north rebuilt piecemeal after the end of the civil war in 2009, and erases a history of war crimes, illicit assassination of activists and journalists, subjugation of minorities, and a legacy of governmental corruption that has now led the country into economic and social crisis. Through its broad range of poets, Out of Sri Lanka redresses this imbalance.

Tamil, Sinhala and English Poetry from Sri Lanka and Its Diasporas

Out of Sri Lanka

Amit Chaudhuri

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

Ravinthiran's second collection is a book of sonnets for his wife. These are love poems that turn analytical, consider the world, and stand for a larger community, including readers themselves. Many describe life in the North-East England for a mixed-race couple, considering both the redemptive force of love and the cultural origins of our discontent.

The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here

Writing about poetry follows models provided either by academic scholarship or literary journalism, each with its pitfalls. The former distances the reader from the poem and effaces the critic’s personality. In literary journalism, the critic is front and center, but the discussion is introductory and prioritizes value judgments. In either case, entrenched practices and patterns of privilege limit one’s perspective. The situation worsens when it comes to minoritized poets and poets from the Global South, where the focus is on restrictive notions of identity: the stylistic innovations of literary works get ousted by prefabricated historical narratives. In Worlds Woven Together, the critic, poet, and scholar Vidyan Ravinthiran searches for alternatives, pursuing close, imaginative readings of a variety of writers. His essays are open-ended, attentive, and curious, unabashedly passionate and subjective yet keenly analytical and investigative. Discussing neglected authors and those well-known in the West, Ravinthiran sees politics as inseparable from literary form and is fascinated by the relation of the creative consciousness to the violences of history. The book features essays on writers including Mir Taqi Mir, Ana Blandiana, A. K. Ramanujan, Marianne Moore, Eunice de Souza, Czeslaw Milosz, Ted Hughes, Rae Armantrout, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Galway Kinnell, Dawn Lundy Martin, and Vahni Capildeo. Revealing serendipitous connections—between poems and cultures, between lines of verse and the lives we lead—Worlds Woven Together is for all readers fascinated by the mechanics and politics of poetry.

Vidyan Ravinthiran

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