Links and reviews

Vidyan's poetry can be read online at The Guardian, The Nation, The London Review of Books, Poetry London and Poetry magazine (there are also links here to several essays); here are some video readings for the BBC and the T.S Eliot Prizes (click for Youtube results). Here's Prac Crit, the online magazine of poetry and poetics he edited with Sarah Howe and Dai George.

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Worlds Woven Together: Essays on Poetry and Poetics:

 

A book of the year in both the TLS (‘Incisive, reflective, illuminating’) and The White Review  ('an inextinguishable curiosity and drive to read more deeply... inexorably beautiful').

 

Probing and provoking, far-ranging but astringent, Ravinthiran would appear a natural successor to Michael Hofmann as a doyen of the long-form essay […] a steely and eye-opening book.

                                    —David Wheatley, The Review of English Studies

 

What would an actually contemporary literary criticism sound like? This magisterial yet companionable book heralds the arrival of a major critical voice and prose stylist, a virtuoso modeling for us ‘styles of attention.’ Vidyan Ravinthiran brings to poetries in English his erudition, formal acuities, a passionately deprovincializing sensibility, political and ethical attunement, and stylistic panache. From Mir Taqi Mir to Thomas Hardy to Elizabeth Bishop to Srinivas Rayaprol, Ravinthiran surveys the territory and remakes it (to use imperial metaphors he would abjure). Impassioned, elegant, sometimes barbed, this is restless, startlingly illuminating criticism. In Ravinthiran, a poet as well as critic, the world-making and world-registering powers of poetry find a brilliant, vivifying advocate.

                                    —Maureen N. McLane, author of My Poets

 

Ravinthiran is a rare critic: one whose deep-diving, finely wrought readings across multiple poetic traditions are dexterous as well as authoritative. He brings a poet’s enthusiasm for craft and language to a reevaluation of critical culture, speaking with great clarity and personality in a voice so capacious that we are compelled to listen, to learn.

                                    —Sandeep Parmar, author of Reading Mina Loy's Autobiographies

 

Vidyan Ravinthiran writes with readerly passion and intellectual commitment  about poetry he loves, at once deeply expert and finely attuned to the pleasures of literary language. The range of authors he celebrates is as impressive as the critical imagination with which he celebrates them. His is a distinctive and memorable voice which speaks eloquently to readers both within and without the academy.

                                    —Seamus Perry, editor of Essays in Criticism

 

Vidyan Ravinthiran’s beautifully written, richly insightful collection is extraordinary in its geographic and cultural breadth, its incisive attention to form, its fusion of the strengths of journalistic and scholarly writing, and its chameleonic openness to, and close tracking of, the twists and turns of poetry.       An eye-opening delight for poets and poetry readers.

                                    —Jahan Ramazani, author of Poetry in a Global Age

 

Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala and English poetry from Sri Lanka and its diaspora

 

received a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation in 2023. It was also a book of the year in the TLS (‘My anthology of the year […] everything an anthology should be: conscientious, archival, surprising, world-building, full of voices and lives’).

 

'There are angry waves crashing throughout this collection, the reverberations of colonialism and imperialism, swelled into a civil war, factions and the demonising of Muslim communities, yet amid all of this, each poem is a silent dewdrop shining on the Sri Lankan diaspora. A compilation of jasmine in full bloom and honey birds by day.' - Roy McFarlane, PBS Selector, Poetry Book Society Summer Bulletin 2023

 

‘Out of Sri Lanka’s post-1948 verse defies Anglo-American marginalisations of ‘world poetry’ and demands we encounter this rich body of work as poetry without qualifying adjectives.’ – Orla Polten, New Internationalist

 

‘This expansive and exciting anthology is edited by Shash Trevett, Seni Seneviratne and Vidyan Ravinthiran … and includes poems by new poets alongside older work, some of which was previously out of print.’ - Will Mackie, New & Recent Poetry from the North, New Writing North

 

 

Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic was awarded both the University English First Book Prize, 2016, and the Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism, 2016.

            From the Chair’s Report for the UE Prize: “the judges…were unanimous in their decision to award the prize to Vidyan Ravinthiran for Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic… a dazzling study of the formal life of the prose of one of the greatest writers of the modern period — her essays, prose poems, and letters. The book establishes a way of analysing the rhythms of prose in a way which will be exemplary for other scholars of the subject, exploring the minutiae of Bishop’s practice with memorably impressive insight and tact. This is a book which effectively discovers a new subject for critical and scholarly enquiry and describes its flexible and responsive genius with remarkable success.”

            And the Warren-Brooks judges: “a new perspective on the works of the 20th century American writer Elizabeth Bishop. The selection committee was particularly impressed by the originality, strong scholarship, readability and wide-ranging appeal of Ravinthiran’s work.”

           The Elizabeth Bishop Bulletin: “a compelling and fundamental breakthrough in Elizabeth Bishop scholarship as well as in the study of literary genre […]  beautifully written, informed not just by Bishop critics but also by important (and neglected) poetry critics of at least the last 100 years […] The book will be a building block for further studies of Bishop’s prose rhythms, and her innovative poetics in the ongoing evolution of poetry. Scholars and poets will delight on hundreds of pithy observations, fresh readings and analyses made here.

          […] We have no doubt that this is a book that will both change Bishop scholarship at the same time as refining our understanding of twentieth-century poetic history.”

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From reviews ofThe Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here (Bloodaxe, 2019):

'To commit an entire collection to the sonnet is a brave act. It shows not just trust in one's abilities but also a humility before the form that any kind of success demands. Few have achieved this in many years but The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here offers an object lesson in finding the scope of the modern sonnet, and using it to record the beauty, sadness, and complexity of the everyday.' - John Burnside, Chair of Judges, T S Eliot Prize 2019

'To me the sonnet should be listed as a piece of UNESCO intangible heritage because the sonnet has lasted for so long in so many different ways...Vidyan Ravinthrian has written an amazing book entirely of sonnets...he's making the sonnet shine. This really is a fantastic, fantastic collection.' - Ian McMillan, introducing Vidyan Ravinthiran at the T S Eliot Prize Readings, 12 January 2020

'My personal favourite...is Vidyan Ravinthiran's The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here, a wonderful sonnet sequence which, as its title implies, is a little bit about everything, including wrens and whimbrels.' - Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Sunday Times [reviewing the ten collections shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize 2019]

'Every poem in Ravinthiran's second collection is a sonnet addressed to his wife, but here is no lack of variety in topic or tone. From interracial love to Sri Lanka's civil war, mental health to Brexit, the range itself speaks of the ideal spouse: the person with whom we can talk about absolutely anything.' - Maria Crawford, Financial Times (Books of the Year 2019: Poetry)

'Formally assured but far from formulaic, this book of sonnets for the poet's wife is testament, at its best, to the ways in which poetry can reach from the particular to the universal. Moving and inviting in their conversational ease, Ravinthiran's sonnets stretch from the grounding details of life for a mixed-race couple in England today... to thoughtfully touch on themes of identity, class, work and community.' - Ben Wilkinson, The Guardian

'...Ravinthiran's second collection is a sequence of loose, warm love sonnets to his wife The outside world leaks through in nods to Brexit and his Sri Lankan family, Larkin and Borges, Super Mario and The X-Files.' --Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph

This is a collection both about the particulars of shared domestic life, and one charged with greater, uninvited, forces. It is about the persistence of that love, and how it might be brought to bear on the wider world; how the intercultural understanding which exists in a couple, if scaled up, has the power to make the world anew, to bring into being new and wondrous modes of coexistence. --Stephanie Sy-Quia, Poetry School 

The poet's domestic introspection is no less than a conduit for contemplation of the troubles which define many lives. And in this fine collection, they include racism...cultural dislocation, mental illness, politics and identity...Vidyan Ravinthiran's collection is both bracing and complex, and it is difficult to give a comprehensive review of such a diversionary, inclusive body of work without venturing into essay territory. --Steve Whitaker, The Yorkshire Times