Synopses & Reviews
"Srikanth Reddy's
Voyager unwinds at a hypnotic pace, as inexorable as a set of philosophic propositions, yet also strangely porous, like poetry. Gradually we come to understand words spoken by Escher in the poem, 'formal objectivity / might be / a personal matter,' but by then it's too late: we're hooked. It's is a work unlike any other, deeply moving, disturbing, and ultimately fulfilling."John Ashbery
"In 'erasing'three times, and in an astonishing variety of poetic styles and verse formsIn the Eye of the Storm, the memoir of Kurt Waldheim, the noted Secretary-General of the UN who, after a decade in office was exposed as having been a Nazi SS officer, Srikanth Reddy has produced one of the great political poems of our time. Using, abusing, recycling, and reformatting Waldheim's own words, Voyager does what no "original" history poem could do: it exposes 'Waldheim's Disease' as much more than one individual's particular mendacity. Read it and weepbut also marvel at Reddy's bravura performance!"Marjorie Perloff, author of The Vienna Paradox
"Our greatest task (all imaginative) is to rid ourselves of the disastrous twentieth century by finding one single gift we can salvage from it. It is the task that Reddy sets himself in this strange, beautiful meditation on Voyager 2, and World War 2. The secret hope is hidden as if in a cloud of stars."Fanny Howe, author of The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation
Review
“These recastings form a highly ambitious book of political poetry that speaks hauntingly of our world.”
Review
“The paradoxical lives of historical figures have long inspired poets, a tradition Reddy embraces and transforms in his audacious, deeply interrogative second collection. . . . Nuanced yet piercing.”
Review
“Through Reddys ‘erasures and the negative capabilities of his excavated text we feel, even if we cannot see, whats missing, whats gone—into outer space, into self-denial, into the ironies of history and of the role between the wielders of pens and of swords. We find ourselves—culpable, impressionable, alive—in the human space he has created.”
Review
“Srikanth Reddys much-anticipated second volume . . . assumes a planetary perspective on the 20th century.”
Review
“Voyager is a nuanced and haunting book of geopolitical, literary, moral, and spiritual inquiry.”
Review
“Reddy has fashioned an arresting, very personal voice by committing himself to using only words and phrases that appeared in—wait for it—Kurt Waldheims memoirs. . . . Reddy is so gifted that the poems, despite their weighty origins, soar.”
Review
“Erasurists find their imaginative space by reading creatively. One of the genre's most creative readers in Srikanth Reddy. Not only is his erasure, the book Voyager, conceptually captivating, but the writing is amazing. Let me repeat that: the writing is amazing.”
Review
"An ambitious, richly imaginative work that poses vital questions about truth, authorship and narrative possibility in contemporary literature."
Synopsis
Srikanth Reddys second book of poetry probes this worlds cosmological relation to the plurality of all possible worlds. Drawing its name from the spacecraft currently departing our solar system on an embassy to the beyond, Voyager unfolds as three books within a book and culminates in a chilling Dantean allegory of leadership and its failure in the cause of humanity. At the heart of this volume lies the historical figure of Kurt WaldheimSecretary-General of the U.N. from 1972-81 and former intelligence officer in Hitlers Wehrmachtwho once served as a spokesman for humanity while remaining silent about his role in the collective atrocities of our era. Resurrecting this complex figure, Reddys universal voyager explores the garden of forking paths hidden within every totalizing dream of identity.
Synopsis
Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Whale and Star Press
Joy Goswami is probably the most highly regarded Bengali poet today, a worthy successor, in a land of poets, to Rabindranath Tagore and Jibanananda Das. Although his life has never been easy, his vocation as a poet has never been in doubt. The quality of Goswamis prolific output has been widely acknowledged in West Bengal and India.Goswamis poems are fierce—in their expression, in the impact of their juxtaposed images, and in the effect that the images have one on another. The poems possess immediacy, drawing readers pell-mell into the essential tensions and delighting in the magic of metamorphoses.
Although readers might easily allow themselves to float on Goswamis crisscrossing images, savor them on second reading, and linger with his crisp and penetrant words, they are quickly brought up short by meaning, for Goswamis words are not just words but penetrating markers of sense. His métier is to cut through to the center of our emotional universe.
Goswami has written more than thirty volumes of poetry and prose; this is the first American publication of his poems.
About the Author
Joy Goswami has earned West Bengals highest literary prizes, and the all-India Sahitya Academy Award. Roald Hoffmann is a poet and playwright and a Nobel Prize-winning chemist.
Table of Contents
Book One
Book Two
Book Three
Epilogues
Acknowledgments