That Was Now, This Is Then

by Vijay Seshadri

Overview

The brilliant new collection from Vijay Seshadri, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning 3 Sections

No one blends ironic intelligence, emotional frankness, radical self-awareness, and complex humor the way Vijay Seshadri does. In this, his fourth collection, he affirms his place as one of America’s greatest living poets. That Was Now, This Is Then takes on the planar paradoxes of time and space, destabilizing highly tuned lyrics and elegies with dizzying turns in poems of unrequitable longing, of longing for longing, of longing to be found, of grief. In these poems, Seshadri’s speaker becomes the subject, the reader becomes the writer, and the multiplying refracted narratives yield an “anguish so pure it almost / feels like joy.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644450369
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	10/06/2020
Pages:	88
Sales rank:	650,069
Product dimensions:	7.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Vijay Seshadri is the author of 3 Sections, winner of the Pulitzer Prize; The Long Meadow, winner of the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets; and Wild Kingdom. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Editorial Reviews

08/17/2020

After the maximalist approach of Seshadri’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 3 Sections, this contemplative fourth collection deploys his trademark philosophical mode with less sharply defined edges, and more room for interruptions and diversion. The first of the book’s three sections features poems for the age of distraction. In “Robocall,” a ringing landline causes “Three or four brand-new ideas—not crisp/ or sensical but, still, helpful to me—” to flee. The second section is anchored in grief; in “Collins Ferry Landing,” an elegy to Seshadri’s father, the poet observes, “Only rivers bottom out like this” before the lineated poem transforms into a dense prose block. These poems movingly capture the feeling of being suspended in a moment, as well as in a culturally mandated experience: “I wasn’t just feeling grief but congratulating myself for it,” the speaker admits. The book’s final section ranges more broadly; one speaker notes that it is “at least a relief to know... you can emerge and re-enter the public sphere.” Fans of Seshadri will find the thoughtfulness, humor, and lyric precision they have come to expect from the poet. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

The essence of Seshadri’s writing is conversation, and that conversation is coiling and liquid, not diffident. Seshadri is fluent in an unusually wide range of forms — he ranges here from rhymed quatrains to fat blocks of prose — and his voice is typically chatty, probing, importuning, self-mocking. . . . He’s a poet who mesmerizes not by stillness but by zigs and zags.”—The New York Times Book Review

“[That Was Now, This Is Then] strikes a rare balance of humor, poignancy, and intellectualism. . . . It is a thrill to watch every iteration of Seshadri’s speaker unravel and re-thread themselves on the page.”—ZYZZYVA

“Seshadri's intellectually graceful poems offer refuge in emotionally turbulent times and invite readers to cross the sacred threshold typically separating the poet from his rapt audience.”—Shelf Awareness, starred review

“This contemplative fourth collection deploys [Seshadri’s] trademark philosophical mode with less sharply defined edges, and more room for interruptions and diversion. . . . Fans of Seshadri will find the thoughtfulness, humor, and lyric precision they have come to expect from the poet.”—Publishers Weekly

“Seshadri is known for elaborate lines and evocative images, and he has built a career around the unexpected turns his lyrics often take. This new collection is no exception, conjuring small moments of intense personal intimacy, as well as broad snapshots of surprising expanses.”—Booklist

“Seshadri’s is a voice that speaks honestly, without any patronizing, a voice that wants to see in each of us ‘the free person, the truly free, free from time, space’. . . . The only way to speak in our time’s moment. Or, any moment.”—Ilya Kaminsky

“Vijay Seshadri conjures the poems in That Was Now, This Is Then out of absence, fashions language from the vast and wild silences surrounding our living. Seshadri’s poetry presses into and recedes from our gaze all in the same gesture. . . . Inconceivably, Seshadri’s best yet.”—Kaveh Akbar

“Vijay Seshadri is arch and canny, a maestro of noir ironies. . . . These are poems of lacerating self-awareness and stoic compassion. That Was Now, This Is Then is a book we need, right now.”—Rosanna Warren

From the Publisher

10/01/2020

This fourth collection by Pulitzer-winner Seshadri (for 2014's 3 Sections) finds the poet haunted by "the ghost we call meaning." It's a candid recognition of the psychic and spiritual trauma these disruptive times have wrought, particularly "the violence done to the mind by the weaponized/ word or image." Chief among the disorienting effects is a troubling desensitization: "all this hostility from every quarter bothers me/ much less than it should. Why the disconnect? I can't figure it out." But while the public sphere is "busy making gossip out of experience" and undermining any sense of shared reality, Seshadri does his best to draw coherence from chaos. In "To the Reader," the final poem in the book, he reaches out to us in a gesture of magical solidarity: "We correspond 1 to 1, and there is a grandeur in this." VERDICT In an engaging, confiding tone that embraces both wit and compassion, Seshadri enlists poetry, what he calls "spooky action at a distance," to assure us that despite the historical moment's forced isolation and heightened sociopolitical stress, we need not feel we're alone.—Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY

Library Journal