Srikanth Reddy's
Readings in World Literature is a book that records the speaker's days as he explores concepts of death in a world literature class he is teaching and as he comes to grips with his own diagnosis with melanoma. And actually, the book is so brief that it feels like more of a chapbook than a complete book. That said, the speaker mentions a number of texts from the Mediterranean to China, and he makes up his own stories along the way. Death seems to enter everything during his days, so much so that trick-or-treaters take on a surreal zombie-like quality in one poem. Personally, I found the response to
Gilgamesh the most compelling, for the speaker mentions the fragmentary nature of the texts and notes the trees, which calls to my mind Robert Pogue Harrison's insightful comments on this part of
Gilgamesh from his book
Forests. Here is a brief excerpt
:
The rings of Saturn kept turning in their groove. For reasons I do not fully understand—my unit on Dante was not scheduled until the following quarter—I dialed 1-800-INFERNO, and, before the first ring, a woman’s voice answered in heavily accented English: “Is it you?” “I think so,” I replied. Outside my window, the honey locusts sprinkled their pale spinning leaves. Focusing on one as it fell seemed to slow the general descent. “Oh creature, gracious and good / traversing the dusky element to visit us / who stained the world with blood,” the woman recited as if reading, against her will, from a prepared text.
Comments