A Call From The Shallows

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

Author: Sunil Iyengar

Publisher: Finishing Line Press

Publication Date: May 20, 2022

Number of Pages: 44 pages

Language: English

Binding: Paperback

ISBN-10: 1646628497

ISBN-13: 9781646628490