Worlds Woven Together

As Vidyan Ravinthiran sees it, the way poetry is written about falls into approaches either defined by academic scholarship or by literary journalism. The former too often distances the reader from the poem and the critic's personality is expunged. In literary journalism, the critic is front-and-center but discussions of the poems and poets are introductory and often risk-averse in their approach. In both spheres, entrenched practices and positions of privilege limit the perspectives and approaches to poetry. As Ravinthiran points out, these patterns are particularly acute in those moments when poetry from the Global South is discussed, if it is considered at all, where the focus is too often on familiar conceptions of identity rather than the formal, aesthetic, qualities or other thematic concerns. In this book, noted poet, critic, and scholar, Ravinthiran stage a series of encounters with poems (and theories about poetry) as a way of rethinking what evaluative, biographical, aesthetically attentive criticism on poetry might otherwise become-and who, crucially, it might otherwise reach and serve. However, much more than just a commentary on how poetry is read, the book also offers close, imaginative readings of a rich variety of poets. The book's essays focus on writers from both the West and the Global South, who are familiar and not-so-familiar to Western readers, including, Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrienne Rich, Czeslaw Milosz, Thom Gunn, Galway Kinnel, Rae Armantout, A. K. Ramanujan, Eunice de Souza, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, and Mir Taqi Mir--