From Publishers Weekly
Following the emotional subtlety and lyrical intensity of his widely-acclaimed debut, Wild Kingdom, Seshadri's new work engages sentimental and grandiose forms of fable and popular characterization. In several poems imbued with nursery rhyme, fantasy, fairy tale and cartoon, Seshadri takes on well-worn cultural icons: the Wicked Witch, the Three Little Pigs and Superman, to name a few. The poems generally lack the kind of fresh perspective found, say, in Anne Sexton's retellings of fairy tales. Here, Superman is bound by simple, inescapable duty (not to mention an ironclad rhyme scheme): "I can't stay away./ I have to fly down/ to watch them pray,// to watch them couple,/ to watch them fight,/ exposing myself/ to their kryptonite." Elsewhere, Seshadri relies on gimmicky forms (the "Interview," the "Lecture") to structure voice-driven poems: "Moving on to the next slide, / we can see, twisted and deliberately coarsened as it is,/ the exact same theme…" An extended section of prose memoir switches gears, using his father's obsession with the Civil War ( and the family's long road trips to famous battle sites) to evoke the complexities of the immigrant experience (Seshadri's own family came from Bangalore to the Midwest) as well as the intricacies of family relations. Particularly poignant is the son's fierce protectiveness of the father: "The passage to America had, happily for him, thrown him free, but it had also stripped him down to his naked soul. Almost to this day, like the sons of Noah, I have longed to walk backward and cover up the nakedness, the drunkenness of his intellectual obsessions, his naked, unheard-of obsessions…" This character is the most real of the book. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
Winner, with this collection, of the long-standing award named after that sublimely clever poet, James Laughlin, Seshadri is himself brilliantly clever in rhymed formal and well-managed free verse. He often capitalizes on the ironies of seeing things as others see them by considering the perspectives of characters with bad reputations, such as, in "Witch Elegy," Oz's Wicked Witch of the West, or those who are usually seen but not heard from, such as the Man of Steel, in "Superman Agonistes." He neatly encapsulates, in "Anima," the immigrant's pangs of otherness, which he, the son of immigrants, may know well himself: "Where, just where, am I that I can never come back?" Long a New Yorker, he sings with manic elegance of the city's polyglot populace (see "Thelma"), and he eloquently spins the allusive, meaningful anecdote (see "The Long Meadow"). Some may be most satisfied, however, by the long prose memoir of his father, a chemical engineer who became a Civil War buff, that interrupts the flow of witty poems. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
Praise for Wild Kingdom:

"In a compassionate, perceptive spirit, Seshadri offers us works that belong among the broadest, most intelligent new poetry of this decade."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)



Review
Praise for Wild Kingdom:

"In a compassionate, perceptive spirit, Seshadri offers us works that belong among the broadest, most intelligent new poetry of this decade."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)



Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 11, 2004
This is a strong, almost reckless voice turning dark experience into an unrelenting sense of possibility.


The New York Times Book Review, April 18, 2004
Seshadri’s ability to see where the fantastic and the realistic mingle...gives this book its...gently persuasive power.


Book Description
The extraordinary second collection by Vijay Seshadri, winner of the 2003 James
Laughlin award of The Academy of American Poets

We hold it against you that you survived.
People better than you are dead,
but you still punch the clock.
Your body has wizened but has not bled
-from "Survivor"

Vijay Seshadri's first collection of poems, Wild Kingdom, was celebrated as one of the most exciting debuts in years. In The Long Meadow, Seshadri presents a brilliant array of formally inventive and emotionally powerful new poems in which the poet's wit and vivacity are poised against the alarming complexities of human experience. Through disparate forms and strategies, from the long narrative and the brief rhyming lyric to the prose meditation, The Long Meadow looks into and through our troubled world with a poetic sensibility that transforms history into metaphysics and disaster into possibility. Here is the voice of one of contemporary poetry's new masters.



About the Author
Vijay Seshadri is the author of Wild Kingdom. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Best American Poetry. Born in India, he lives in India and Brooklyn, New York.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Vijay Seshadri's first collection of poems, Wild Kingdom, was celebrated as one of the most exciting debuts in years. In The Long Meadow, Seshadri presents a brilliant array of formally inventive and emotionally powerful new poems in which the poet's wit and vivacity are poised against the alarming complexities of human experience. Through disparate forms and strategies, from the long narrative and the brief rhyming lyric to the prose meditation, The Long Meadow looks into and through our troubled world by means of a poetic sensibility that transforms history into metaphysics and disaster into possibility. Here is the voice of one of contemporary poetry's new masters.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New Yorker

Seshadri’s second collection is gracefully contemporary—“Superman Agonistes” is the title of one poem—and effortlessly ranges from Russian Church history to Rocky and Bullwinkle. The book centers on a short prose essay about the obsession of his father, an Indian immigrant, with the American Civil War. A scientist, his father is skeptical of “hidden and untenable assumptions” and dismissive of his poet son’s suggestion of parallels with the fratricidal war in the Mahabharata—“The Mahabharata is just a story.” Now a father himself, Seshadri wonders what wisdom he has to impart to his own son and wittily dissects “The Three Little Pigs.” He reflects, “The Christians say / the story of the universe is the story of a boy and his dad. / They are absolutely right.”

Publishers Weekly