Böcker av Vidyan Ravinthiran

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.

Studies the afterlife of the Romantic idea of spontaneity in transatlantic modern prose in the work of William Hazlitt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Herman Melville, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Saul Bellow, to provide a broad-based historical enquiry into what it means to read, write, and live as a modern person.

The critic, poet, and scholar Vidyan Ravinthiran searches for alternatives to the standard models of writing about poetry, pursuing close, imaginative readings of a variety of authors. Discussing neglected writers and those well-known in the West, these essays are unabashedly passionate and subjective yet keenly analytical and investigative.

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 for a mixed-race couple, considering both the redemptive force of love and the cultural origins of our discontent.

Elizabeth Bishop is now recognized as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth centurya uniquely cosmopolitan writer with connections to the US, Canada, Brazil, and also the UK, given her neglected borrowings from many English authors, and her strong influence on modern British verse. Yet the dominant biographical/psychoanalytical approach leaves her style relatively untouchedand it is vital that an increasing focus on archival material does not replace our attention to the writing itself. Bishop's verse is often compared with prose (sometimes insultingly); writing fiction, she worried she was really writing poems. But what truly is the difference between poetry and prosestructurally, conceptually, historically speaking? Is prose simply formalized speech, or does it have rhythms of its own? Ravinthiran seeks an answer to this question through close analysis of Bishop's prose-like verse, her literary prose, her prose poems, and her letter prose. This title is a provocation. It demands that we reconsider the pejorative quality of the word prosaic; playing on mosaic, Ravinthiran uses Bishop's thinking about prose to approachfor the first timeher work in multiple genres as a stylistic whole.Elizabeth Bishop's Prosaic is concerned not only with her inimitable style, but also larger questions to do with the Anglo-American shift from closed to open forms in the twentieth century. This study identifies not just borrowings from, but rich intertextual relationships with, writers as diverse asamong othersGerard Manley Hopkins, W.H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, Flannery O'Connor, and Dorothy Richardson. (Though Bishop criticized Woolf, she in particular is treated as a central and thus far neglected precursor, crucial to our understanding of Bishop as a feminist poet.) Finally, the sustained discussion of how the history of prose frames effects of rhythm, syntax, and acoustic texturein both Bishop's prose proper and her prosaic verseextends a body of research which seeks now to treat literature as a form of cognition. Technique and thought are finely wedded in Bishop's workher literary forms evince a historical intelligence attuned to questions of power, nationality, tradition (both literary and otherwise), race, and gender.

First collection by British poet and critic (of Sri Lankan parentage) with lively poems fusing politics, personal history and myth.