The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here - Paperback
by Vidyan Ravinthiran (Author)
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. Shortlisted for the 2019 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the collection is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in Leeds, to Sri Lankan Tamils. 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. His second, The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here (Bloodaxe Books, 2019) won a Northern Writers Award and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was shortlisted for both the 2019 Forward Prize for Best Collection and for the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize. After teaching at the universities of Cambridge, Durham and Birmingham in the UK, he now teaches at Harvard in the US. He is 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. On top of his academic work, he writes literary journalism, and is represented as an author of fiction by the Wylie Agency.
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