A Call from the Shallows by Sunil Iyengar

$14.99

 

“How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,” Shakespeare writes, “Whose action is no stronger than a flower?” Sunil Iyengar answers the question in this dazzling debut collection with poems of poise, wit, and depth of thought. One seldom reads poetry with such a balanced, almost Augustan, sense of the poetic line and rightness of rhyme. A Call from the Shallows is a pleasure from beginning to end.

–Richard Tillinghast

 

The poems in Sunil Iyengar’s A Call from the Shallows—classical motifs fixed in contemporary language—display an elegance rarely encountered in an era of professionalized, informal verse, as when his “roses in bloom, astonished at their own / brevity, throng the lip of the tall glass.” Iyengar’s formidable erudition and shrewd meditations come to life in each carefully constructed line. Even such reassuring comforts as a family home are thrown open, as when “a For Sale sign / sheltered against a fallen pine,” announces an “old Colonial free / of any claims to privacy.” Iyengar questions all we take for granted, permitting the reader a new way of understanding a confusing, yet, to Iyengar, still promising world, “so that we might transmit pity / instead of loss, defeat, or shame.”

–Ernest Hilbert, author of Last One Out

 

 

 

 

Category:

Description

A Call from the Shallows

by Sunil Iyengar

$14.99, paper

978-1-64662-849-0

2022

Sunil Iyengar writes poems and book reviews. He lives outside Washington, DC, where he works as an arts research director. His writings have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Criterion, Washington Post, Essays in Criticism, Literary Matters, The Hopkins Review, and many other publications. A Call from the Shallows is his first chapbook.

Reviews

There are no reviews yet.

Be the first to review “A Call from the Shallows by Sunil Iyengar”

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *