Avidya
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Publishing:24th Apr '25
£12.00
This title is due to be published on 24th April, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
These poems emerged from journeys of great personal significance, and out of a migrant sensibility tied to three different countries. 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.
To commit an entire collection to the sonnet is a brave act. It shows not just trust in one's abilities but also a humility before the form that any kind of success demands. Few have achieved this in many years but The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here offers an object lesson in finding the scope of the modern sonnet, and using it to record the beauty, sadness, and complexity of the everyday. -- John Burnside * Chair of Judges, T S Eliot Prize 2019 *
Formally assured but far from formulaic, this book of sonnets for the poet’s wife is testament, at its best, to the ways in which poetry can reach from the particular to the universal. Moving and inviting in their conversational ease, Ravinthiran’s sonnets stretch from the grounding details of life for a mixed-race couple in England today… to thoughtfully touch on themes of identity, class, work and community. -- Ben Wilkinson * The Guardian, on The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here *
Skill meets great tenderness in Vidyan Ravinthiran’s sonnet series The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here. These poems brim with ingenuity and each one is a small feat of linguistic daring. Taking love and wonderment as a broad umbrella, we track the intimacies of a marriage through displays of nationalism, xenophobia, familial distance as well as the every day moments known only between lovers. The reader is invited into the home and imaginations of a husband and wife and feels that they are less interloper than celebrant witnessing an enduring bond—not just theirs but what links us as people inhabiting the same world. As Ravinthiran writes in ‘Union’, 'It’s with your love I try to love that stranger / who walked so far to read this page.' -- Sandeep Parmar and Naomi Shihab Nye * co-judges for the Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections 2021 *
ISBN: 9781780377391
Dimensions: 234mm x 156mm x 8mm
Weight: unknown
80 pages
Paperback original