Deepening Groove - Softcover

Shankar, Ravi

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1935716085 ISBN 13: 9781935716082

Publisher: National Poetry Review Press, 2011

Synopsis

"The poems in Deepening Groove proceed in elegant triplets that drift effortlessly down the page on waves of sound, serenely self-confident. The subjects are animals, trees, flowers, fish, the weather, and the human condition, all mixed up in a heady stew that simmers quietly one minute, and shimmers brightly the next. This is a book of savvy, delicious surprises." -Wyn Cooper "In Deepening Groove, Ravi Shankar's poems are small wonders of defining, seeing, and sound. He is a poet fascinated with transformations and here are shiftings of dust and sand, loon calls, flutterings of insects, changing tides and splendid cascades- always information-driven, often rapturous with Hopkins-like intensities, imperatives, and trochaic stresses. What I'm most taken by is how the poems both see and feel simultaneously: In "Dark," "Darkness in New England has a flavor close / to anise, a texture plush as peat moss." In "Bats," the bats' flight is "carrying away pieces of us, / a maelstrom too faint to see, turning to ellipsis...." In virtually all these poems, to quote words from "Willard Pond," there is "a sense // that the distance between the alternate / universes humans" [and other creatures on Earth] "inhabit is smaller / than ever imagined and more astonishing." And although the poems give special pleasures on first encounters, they contain-as in "The Oyster"-"secrets that require / a knife to pry open and vinegar to serve." Deepening Groove shows Ravi Shankar is truly, now, one of America's finest younger poets." -Dick Allen Ravi Shankar is Executive Director of Drunken Boat and Co-Director of the Creative Writing Program at Central Connecticut State University. His first full length book was Instrumentality (Word Press, 2004). Along with Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, he edited Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle East & Beyond (W.W. Norton & Co.). He has appeared in the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education, and on the BBC and NPR. He teaches in Fairfield University's MFA Program and in the first international MFA Program at City University of Hong Kong.

About this title

About the Author

Ravi Shankar, the legendary sitarist and composer, is a singular phenomenon in the classical music worlds of the East and West. He has written music for Yehudi Menuhin, Jean Pierre Rampal, Phillip Glass and George Harrison. The international award-winning musician is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is a member of the United Nations International Rostrum of Composers. He is known for his pioneering work in bringing Indian music to the West. He lives in California and India.

Edition details

• Publisher: National Poetry Review Press
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1935716085
• ISBN 13: 9781935716082
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 74