Voyager (New California Poetry) (Volume 31)

Voyager (New California Poetry) (Volume 31)

Srikanth Reddy’s second book of poetry probes this world’s cosmological relation to the plurality of all possible worlds. Drawing its name from the spacecraft currently departing our solar system on an embassy to the beyond, Voyager unfolds as three books within a book and culminates in a chilling Dantean allegory of leadership and its failure in the cause of humanity. At the heart of this volume lies the historical figure of Kurt Waldheim―Secretary-General of the U.N. from 1972-81 and former intelligence officer in Hitler’s Wehrmacht―who once served as a spokesman for humanity while remaining silent about his role in the collective atrocities of our era. Resurrecting this complex figure, Reddy’s universal voyager explores the garden of forking paths hidden within every totalizing dream of identity. The paradoxical lives of historical figures have long inspired poets, a tradition Reddy embraces and transforms in his audacious, deeply interrogative second collection. The opening section is strangely disembodied and aphoristically philosophical, even as each line oscillates between outrage and compassion. We learn the source of these rigorous distillations in a cycle of concentrated prose poems, which informs us that among the messages stowed on the Voyager spacecraft, which is now leaving the solar system, is a letter from Kurt Waldheim. Secretary general of the UN when the mission was launched in 1977, Waldheim became a painfully ironic �spokesman for humanity� once his Nazi past was exposed. In a stunning labor of correction, Reddy crossed out �line after line� of Waldheim�s 1985 memoir, In the Eye of the Storm, and extracted words and phrases that he reassembled to create plangent poems, including a haunting soliloquy. Reddy�s book of nuanced yet piercing inquiries into matters of conscience and ambition, truth and power, peace and war emulates its astonishing namesake, arcing across time and space to cast light on mysteries of cosmic significance. --Donna Seaman “These recastings form a highly ambitious book of political poetry that speaks hauntingly of our world.” ― Publishers Weekly “The paradoxical lives of historical figures have long inspired poets, a tradition Reddy embraces and transforms in his audacious, deeply interrogative second collection. . . . Nuanced yet piercing.” ― Booklist “Through Reddy’s ‘erasures’ and the negative capabilities of his excavated text we feel, even if we cannot see, what’s missing, what’s gone―into outer space, into self-denial, into the ironies of history and of the role between the wielders of pens and of swords. We find ourselves―culpable, impressionable, alive―in the human space he has created.” ― Chronicle Of Higher Education “Reddy has fashioned an arresting, very personal voice by committing himself to using only words and phrases that appeared in―wait for it―Kurt Waldheim’s memoirs. In lesser hands, this could have been just another preposterous “project” book. Reddy is so gifted that the poems, despite their weighty origins, soar.” ― New Yorker “Instantly aphoristic, with the cultural authority of familiar music, Book One alone is enough to secure a poetic reputation. . . . Voyager is an indication of what is possible in the form. For its remarkable innovation, panoramic lyricism, and utter empathy, it may well endure.” ― Harvard Review “Erasurists find their imaginative space by reading creatively. One of the genre's most creative readers in Srikanth Reddy. Not only is his erasure, the book Voyager , conceptually captivating, but the writing is amazing. Let me repeat that: the writing is amazing.” ― Believer Magazine "An ambitious, richly imaginative work that poses vital questions about truth, authorship and narrative possibility in contemporary literature." ― International Examiner "Srikanth Reddy's Voyager unwinds at a hypnotic pace, as inexorable as a set of philosophic propositions, yet also strangely porous, like poetry. Gradually we come to understand words spoken by Escher in the poem, 'formal objectivity / might be / a personal matter,' but by then it's too late: we're hooked. It's is a work unlike any other, deeply moving, disturbing, and ultimately fulfilling." John Ashbery "In 'erasing' three times, and in an astonishing variety of poetic styles and verse forms In the Eye of the Storm , the memoir of Kurt Waldheim, the noted Secretary-General of the UN who, after a decade in office was exposed as having been a Nazi SS officer, Srikanth Reddy has produced one of the great political poems of our time. Using, abusing, recycling, and reformatting Waldheim's own words, Voyager does what no "original" history poem could do: it exposes 'Waldheim's Disease' as much more than one individual's particular mendacity. Read it and weep but also marvel at Reddy's bravura performance!" Marjorie Perloff, author of The Vienna Paradox "Our greatest task (all imaginative) is to rid ourselves of the disastrous twentieth century by fin