These poems emerged from journeys of great personal significance, and out of a migrant sensibility tied to three different countries. Sensuous, droll, yearning, they consider otherwise forgotten (ignored, repressed, erased) events.
In 2017, Vidyan Ravinthiran travelled to the north of Sri Lanka where his parents grew up – it finally felt safe – visiting war-torn Tamil areas overwritten by a tourist focus on the sun-spoiled South. In 2020, he, his wife and their one-year-old moved from Britain to the United States, months before the pandemic hit and the travel ban separated them for almost two years from family overseas.
Avidya is a political and a spiritual collection, whose multiple poetic forms, open and closed, are shaped by myth and philosophy, and by Sri Lankan as well as global crises. It is also a book about the forms of both strength and fear that parents pass on to their children.
Praise for The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here (2019):
'To commit an entire collection to the sonnet is a brave act. It shows not just trust in one's abilities but also a humility before the form that any kind of success demands. Few have achieved this in many years but The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here offers an object lesson in finding the scope of the modern sonnet, and using it to record the beauty, sadness, and complexity of the everyday.' - John Burnside, Chair of Judges, T S Eliot Prize 2019
‘Formally assured but far from formulaic, this book of sonnets for the poet’s wife is testament, at its best, to the ways in which poetry can reach from the particular to the universal. Moving and inviting in their conversational ease, Ravinthiran’s sonnets stretch from the grounding details of life for a mixed-race couple in England today… to thoughtfully touch on themes of identity, class, work and community.’ – Ben Wilkinson, The Guardian
'Skill meets great tenderness in Vidyan Ravinthiran’s sonnet series The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here. These poems brim with ingenuity and each one is a small feat of linguistic daring. Taking love and wonderment as a broad umbrella, we track the intimacies of a marriage through displays of nationalism, xenophobia, familial distance as well as the every day moments known only between lovers. The reader is invited into the home and imaginations of a husband and wife and feels that they are less interloper than celebrant witnessing an enduring bond—not just theirs but what links us as people inhabiting the same world. As Ravinthiran writes in ‘Union’, “It’s with your love I try to love that stranger / who walked so far to read this page.”' - Sandeep Parmar and Naomi Shihab Nye, Co-Judges for the Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections 2021
‘Every poem in Ravinthiran’s second collection is a sonnet addressed to his wife, but here is no lack of variety in topic or tone. From interracial love to Sri Lanka’s civil war, mental health to Brexit, the range itself speaks of the ideal spouse: the person with whom we can talk about absolutely anything.’ – Maria Crawford, Financial Times (Best Poetry Books of the Year 2019)
‘Ravinthiran’s second collection is a sequence of loose, warm love sonnets to his wife… The outside world leaks through in nods to Brexit and his Sri Lankan family, Larkin and Borges, Super Mario and The X-Files.’ – Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph
'In these days of polemical identity assertion it’s refreshing to read a book whose explorations of identity and relationship are as generous, subtle and sensitively enquiring as these… The heart of the volume is the thoughtfulness with which personal difficulties are related to wider issues, the intimacy with which personal vulnerabilities are revealed, the radiance of the love breaking through clouds of difficulty and distraction, and the generosity of spirit looking with an equal eye at the poet’s own experience and that of other people.' - Edmund Prestwich, PN Review
'Through these beautiful poems of love and the domestic, we encounter the wider world; its racism, its parents, its day-to-day minutiae of living... There is violence lurking here too, a history which keeps threatening to break out from the tight lines and, alongside love, we are asked to consider the value of art, and of politics as well; the ultimate effect and feeling is one of radical sincerity as we move through the collection. Larkin, who gives this collection its title, was a poet who was never afraid to reach towards "Poetry", towards the transcendent truth of the perfectly-selected image. He does not go un-critiqued within this collection, but this is a collection with that same sincere belief in the power of language to capture a feeling precisely.' – Andrew McMillan, PBS Bulletin
Vidyan Ravinthiran talks about The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here
Vidyan Ravinthiran discusses his collection The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here following its shortlisting for the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize.
Vidyan Ravinthiran reads ‘New Year's Eve’
Vidyan Ravinthiran reads and introduces his poem ‘New Year's Eve’ from his T.S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted collection The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here.
Vidyan Ravinthiran reads ‘Sea break’
Vidyan Ravinthiran reads and introduces his poem ‘Sea break’ from his T.S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted collection The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here.
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