Vijay Seshadri

3 Sections: Poems
By Vijay Seshadri
Graywolf Press, 2015
Paperback, 88pp

"What took me so long to think it? / Before, though, I can grab its tail, its head scuttles / into nonbeing."

Winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, 3 Sections is many things and one thing: the frustration of language. An array of properties comes to mind while reading Seshadri's lines: cosmopolitan; Kantian; Wittgensteinian; anti-Platonic; apocalyptic; the elusiveness of ideas and meanings; urban malaise. The poems show more can sing, they can loaf and loam, and they can explode in a sudden conflagration, as in "Memoir." They can be sublime, as in "Heaven": "...thinking comes down to this-- / mystery, longing, thirst." The use of consonance, as in "Mixed-Media Botanical Drawing" invites us to enjoy chanting the words aloud, savoring the glide of language and delaying meaning for a time. "New Media" and other poems distill reality down to facts and words, but with a dark edge: "Stare at a word in a book long enough and that word / slowly uncouples itself from what it means" ("Personal Essay"). There is a sense of desperation to ensnare the perfect idea, thought, language to make sense of conscious experience, yet the horizon keeps receding. show less

I really enjoyed these poems which often start with very concrete images and drift off into the numinous void of being. I especially enjoyed the memoir of Seshadri touring U.S. Civil War battlefields as a child with his Civil War obsessed Indian-American father.

Prize winning collection of poetry that lives up to all the acclaim. The thing that is most striking to me is the strength of every single poem whether they are short one pagers or longer narratives. Another wonderful quality of these poems is the tremendous diversity of subject material from salmon fishing and the fishing industry to nursing homes and dreams. Every page was a total surprise. If I were to describe this book in one word it would be "fresh".

A very interesting memoir of Seshadri's father's obsession with the US Civil War and the bonds between father and son. Thinking back on Confederates in the Attic, I wonder if there's a book to be written on Immigrants to the United States and their attitudes towards the Civil War.