Author: Vikram Seth
Publisher: Penguin/Viking
Year: 2005
Language: English
Pages: 83
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0670058432
Description
This collection of poems reflect for the most part our own times and are rewarding for the manner in which life is faithfully and often poignantly restored in poetic shapes. This is another major triumph from one of the world's most important poets.
In this collection of poems, his first book since ‘The Golden Gate’, the best-selling novel inverse, Vikram Seth’s marvelous facility with language is once again displayed to full effect. But beyond this, he demonstrates a new range, perhaps best exemplified in the second section ‘In Other Voices’, where he relives the experience of others—a Nazi concentration camp commandant, the poet Ghalib, a doctor in Hiroshima on the day the atom bomb fell—in poetry rich in implication and concrete detail.
The poems in the other four sections reflect, for the most part, our own times and are rewarding for the manner in which life is faithfully and often poignantly restored in poetic shapes. ‘All You Who Sleep Tonight’ is another major triumph from one of the world’s most important poets.
Contents
CHAPTER I
ROMANTIC RESIDUES
Round and Round
Protocols
A Style of Loving
Across
Equals
Mistaken
Sit
The Room and the Street
Walk
CHAPTER II
IN OTHER VOICES
To Wei Ba, Who Has Lived Away from the Court
Lithuania: Question and Answer Work and Freedom
Ghalib, Two Years after the Mutiny
A Doctor’s Journal Entry for August 6, 1945
Soon
CHAPTER III
IN OTHER PLACES
Hill Dawn
Suzhou Park
Night in Jiangning
Lion Grove, Suzhou
Tourists
Qingdao: December
The Monk at Han Shan Temple
On the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge
The Scent of Sage and Bay
CHAPTER IV
QUATRAINS
Telephone
God’s Love
Dark Road
Pigeons
Pomegranate
Southward Bound
Pendulum
Advice to Orators
Cant
Malefic Things
Door
Night Watch
Condition
Half Out of Sleep
Prandial Plaint
Interpretation
The End
Promise
Reunion
Passage
CHAPTER V
MEDITATIONS OF THE HEART
The Stray Cat
Poet
Adagio
Mist
How Rarely These Few Years
Things
Voices
Heart
The Wind
All You Who Sleep Tonight