SEER

by Indran Amirthanayagam

92 pages, Paperback

Published December 15, 2024

About the author

Indran Amirthanayagam writes poetry and essays in English, Spanish, French and Portuguese. His works include The Splintered Face, Ceylon R.I.P., El Infierno de Los Pájaros, El Hombre que Recoge Nidos, Sol Camuflado, La Pelota del Pulpo and The Elephants Of Reckoning, which won the 1994 Paterson Poetry Prize. His poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and journals throughout the world. He has also published translations of Mexican poets Manuel Ulacia and Jose Eugenio Sanchez. He is a diplomat in the United States Foreign Service.

Reviews

[Inderjeet Mani]

Written in the shadow of the COVID pandemic, this generous collection carries us beyond the poems into the extraordinary heart of the poet himself. In SEER, Indran Amirthanayagam’s expansive, Whitmanesque voice embraces his multicultural identity within his transnational, transcultural, and polyglot writing world. This poet-diplomat and world traveler does not believe in borders; there is no elsewhere, his poetic voice boldly declares. Few poets move so fluently among five languages and so many cultures, and fewer still let us witness, almost in real time, the act of writing itself. Here we meet his family, his mother in her last days, his daughter’s visits, his brothers, and taste the foods that evoke fragments of a vanished past. We travel with him to Trinidad and back, especially in the marvelous “Road Trip, San Fernando—Mayaro” where island spices, road scenes, and remembered people gather into a timeless idyll. Here is a wonderful poet of memory, appetite, tenderness, and spellbinding story.