Wild Kingdom Book

Vijay Seshadri is a poet of street scenes and seascapes, twisted alder stumps and spawning salmon, as well as drive-by shootings and thumping reggae bass. In Wild Kingdom he goes in search of the primordial face behind the civilized mask, the place where "wolfpacks of nothingness stalk / the signature stinks and blood trails of man." He doesn't have far to travel. Whether his subject is the "ancient terror" of marriage, in "Prothalamion," or a northwester "glittering with malice" in "The Lump," Seshadri seems peculiarly subject to powers both old and inexorable. "All this was the brainchild of water," as the lost hiker of "Lifeline" realizes, and throughout Wild Kingdom groundwater rises in crevices, polar icecaps melt, and rain wears its passage through rock. Nature here is as pervasive as myth, and just as annihilating. Yet not all is Sturm und Drang: witness the joyous "Big Mama!" that ends a stanza of the prehistoric love poem "My Esmeralda," or the ebullient voice of God in "An Oral History of Migration": "You be that thing, He said." Making use of long, conversational lines as well as meticulous rhymes, Seshadri's voice is elegant, energetic, and startlingly original--who else would say of a refugee that he is "pinned like a flower on the genocidal past"? "I can see by your faces that / your hearts are good, and like to think / mine is, too," he writes in "The Testimonies of Ramon Fernandez. As the rest of the poem tells us, we should believe him, stand back, and let him work. --Mary ParkRead More