Facts for Visitors

Facts for Visitors by Srikanth Reddy 

University of California Press, 2004, 62 pages, $18.95

Echoing through Srikanth Reddy’s first collection of poetry is the urge toward the unknown, toward uncovering the alien and turning it into something permanent, if only for the span of the poem in question. Facts for Visitors moves lyrically through both Dantean circles and foreign countries with ease and stark beauty. Reddy examines the new with unexpected evocations of meaning, but does not underestimate the roll of the traditional and its stake in helping him to make such exciting leaps. From his uses and recreations of the villanelle and terza rima, Reddy moves the reader through a world that has died, as seen in “Burial Practice” and is now creating, “a passage between us.”

From the first poem of Section I, a tone of instruction and factual authority wraps itself around the reader, beckoning them to believe in this mystic journey and understand the importance of the new realities of the world. And overwhelmingly the reader is compelled and surprised into finding a home in this strange, albeit lovely, new space. From lines such as, “The bear stopped dancing & unscrewed his head / He held it upside down in the dusk” from “Thieves Market” to “I split open a seed with the edge of my thumbnail…/ There was a very small tree / folded up inside, with one pale leaf on a stem, / the length of an eyelash” from “Jungle Book” the examination of worlds within worlds and multilayered meanings is as much about the protagonist finding new levels of himself as it is the reader discovering new possibilities in their surroundings.

As the book progresses, it blends prose poetry alongside narrative, alongside stricter lyrics, and the outcome is a diverse living ocean; apt given the amount of time spent gesturing toward the unfamiliar, which is also the necessary of this collection. Reddy focuses on bodies of water and their inhabitants in several poems, most notably in “Corruption,” “Hotel Lullaby” and “Palinode.” Interestingly, “Palinode” comes toward the end and calls back to life the collection’s muse, Ursula-introduced as dead in “Burial Practice”-not as the expected phoenix, but rather as a rigorous light, shining on anything that may have passed as absolute truth between the pages.

-reviewed by Jennifer Humbert