The Disappearances

'Vijay Seshadri's poems are wittily alive to everything, continually quick and surprising, expertly turned.' – Richard Wilbur Grave and witty, classical and contemporary, The Disappearances brings together the best of Vijay Seshadri's poetry, drawn from The Long Meadow (2004) and Wild Kingdom (1996). The award-winning poet, described as 'a writer of subtle, elastic and unblinking intelligence', is being published in India for the first time. 'Vijay Seshadri tracks 'the signature stinks and blood trails' of our species–its squalor and splendor, seen here with both charity and rage– exhilaratingly in this book. The poems have both electric energy and gravitas. Short and long poems (which is rare) equally have authority. The distinction with which this new voice deciphers the 'Rosetta stone' of our 'defective mythologies' is unmistakable, and absorbing.' – Frank Bidart 'These are poems full of musical light and dark wit. Their cadences are wonderfully poised between regret and discovery. Vijay Seshadri is a lyric poet who can mix elegy and affirmation within a few stanzas of one another. He makes the landscape and the cityscape into one challenging and heartbreaking place where the old transformations of language can still happen.' --Eaven Boland