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Avidya
Joint Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2025
The poems in this collection emerged from journeys of great personal significance, and out of a migrant sensibility tied to three different Sri Lanka, the UK and the USA. 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.
The poems in this collection emerged from journeys of great personal significance, and out of a migrant sensibility tied to three different Sri Lanka, the UK and the USA. 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.
- GenresPoetry
70 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 24, 2025
21 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 19, 2025
Forward Prize nominees for Best Collection, 2025: #2 out of 6
Haunting lyrical poems intertwine myth with Sri Lankan politics and history with a personal saga of migration that stems from the events in Sri Lanka in the 1980s. This is one of the most assiduously edited poetry collections I've ever read. There are times where the Ravinthiran does a stunning job communicating images and sensations in subtle, unspoken ways. Most of the time, a good poetry collection offers you quotable lines, but here there are entire living images. Part of this collection's success is that it's so good at being enigmatic and beautiful without prying itself open -- something hardly any writers dare to attempt these days. That said, as someone with a limited view of the context/history in relation to the speaker, a few of these felt inaccessible to me and I'd like to understand them better, maybe during a re-read.
Haunting lyrical poems intertwine myth with Sri Lankan politics and history with a personal saga of migration that stems from the events in Sri Lanka in the 1980s. This is one of the most assiduously edited poetry collections I've ever read. There are times where the Ravinthiran does a stunning job communicating images and sensations in subtle, unspoken ways. Most of the time, a good poetry collection offers you quotable lines, but here there are entire living images. Part of this collection's success is that it's so good at being enigmatic and beautiful without prying itself open -- something hardly any writers dare to attempt these days. That said, as someone with a limited view of the context/history in relation to the speaker, a few of these felt inaccessible to me and I'd like to understand them better, maybe during a re-read.
August 23, 2025
"...Our lives would be free verse. Or, a wedding/between impulse and form, desire and history, a dead god/presiding over it all...The dead live only in our heads."
Ecological disasters jostle with the myths of the Mahabharata in AVIDYA, a collection that reimagines Sri Lankan history and politics through Ravinthiran's multicultural and multilingual perspective. His poems often dwell on real-life incidents such as the X-Press Pearl chemical spill or the assassination of journalist Lasantha Wickrematunge and their effects on Sri Lankan life, with his long elegy towards the latter quoting chillingly from Wickrematunge's own editorials to highlight the country's fraught political environment.
The majority of these poems are composed in free verse (a few exceptions borrow their form from existing poems in the Western canon; a particularly effective example of this reworks Keats' "To Autumn"), but their formal simplicity belies Ravinthiran's sharp-eyed use of imagery and allusion. Take "Trinco", which segues seamlessly from past to present, using the images of the speaker blocking out the smell of woodapple juice or losing themselves in a statue's details to evoke repressing memories of historical conflicts. Or "Karna", perhaps the most explicitly personal poem in this collection, which is equally agile in how it refracts the birth of Ravinthiran's child through the story of Karna, one of the great antiheroes of the Mahabharata.
Ecological disasters jostle with the myths of the Mahabharata in AVIDYA, a collection that reimagines Sri Lankan history and politics through Ravinthiran's multicultural and multilingual perspective. His poems often dwell on real-life incidents such as the X-Press Pearl chemical spill or the assassination of journalist Lasantha Wickrematunge and their effects on Sri Lankan life, with his long elegy towards the latter quoting chillingly from Wickrematunge's own editorials to highlight the country's fraught political environment.
The majority of these poems are composed in free verse (a few exceptions borrow their form from existing poems in the Western canon; a particularly effective example of this reworks Keats' "To Autumn"), but their formal simplicity belies Ravinthiran's sharp-eyed use of imagery and allusion. Take "Trinco", which segues seamlessly from past to present, using the images of the speaker blocking out the smell of woodapple juice or losing themselves in a statue's details to evoke repressing memories of historical conflicts. Or "Karna", perhaps the most explicitly personal poem in this collection, which is equally agile in how it refracts the birth of Ravinthiran's child through the story of Karna, one of the great antiheroes of the Mahabharata.
April 27, 2025
Para ser un poema narrativo, medio pete. Me ahce acordar al musical Emilia Perez, que dicen que es un musical pero en realidad las canciones son diálogos cantados. En este caso, son microcuentos/relatos cortados en verso.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews