The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here

by Vidyan Ravinthiran

Overview

Vidyan Ravinthiran’s second collection is a book of sonnets for his wife. These are love poems that turn analytical, consider the world, and in which the pronoun 'we' aspires to stand for a larger community, including (if you like) readers themselves. Many describe life in the North East for a mixed-race couple, considering both the redemptive force of love and the cultural origins of our discontent. Brexit; racist and sexist abuse; class; our work-life balance, and our relationship with institutions (be it our employer, or the NHS); taboos surrounding mental health; civil war in Sri Lanka; media representation of minorities; immigrant anxieties: these poems look inward, but also outward. Worrying at the link between society and our private lives, they scorn a politics which would put us all in separate boxes. Love, and imagination, may not conquer all, but as recent shocks suggest, ‘we’ must at least try to understand people different to us. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781780374772
Publisher:	Bloodaxe Books
Publication date:	06/20/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	59
File size:	712 KB

About the Author

Vidyan Ravinthiran teaches at the University of Birmingham, and is an editor at Prac Crit, the online magazine of poetry and poetics, as well as the author of Elizabeth Bishop's Prosaic (Bucknell, 2015), winner of both the University English Prize and the Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism. His first book of poems, Grun-tu-molani (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. Poems towards his second collection, The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here, published by Bloodaxe in 2019, won a Northern Writers Award, and the book was given a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. He also writes literary journalism, most recently for Poetry (verse) and The Telegraph (fiction), and is represented as an author of fiction by the Wylie Agency.

Editorial Reviews

‘Also on the shortlist [for the Forward Prize for Best Collection] is another collection that approaches divisive politics with humanity and warmth: Vidyan Ravinthiran’s The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here. 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

From the Publisher