A Call from the Shallows

By Sunil Iyengar

"How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea," Shakespeare writes, "Whose action is no stronger than a flower?" Sunil Iyengar answers the question in this dazzling debut collection with poems of poise, wit, and depth of thought. One seldom reads poetry with such a balanced, almost Augustan, sense of the poetic line and rightness of rhyme. A Call from the Shallows is a pleasure from beginning to end.-Richard Tillinghast
The poems in Sunil Iyengar's A Call from the Shallows-classical motifs fixed in contemporary language-display an elegance rarely encountered in an era of professionalized, informal verse, as when his "roses in bloom, astonished at their own / brevity, throng the lip of the tall glass." Iyengar's formidable erudition and shrewd meditations come to life in each carefully constructed line. Even such reassuring comforts as a family home are thrown open, as when "a For Sale sign / sheltered against a fallen pine," announces an "old Colonial free / of any claims to privacy." Iyengar questions all we take for granted, permitting the reader a new way of understanding a confusing, yet, to Iyengar, still promising world, "so that we might transmit pity / instead of loss, defeat, or shame."-Ernest Hilbert, author of Last One Out

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1646628497
• ISBN13: 9781646628490
• Release Date: May 2022
• Publisher: Finishing Line Press
• Length: 44 Pages
• Weight: 0.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.1" x 5.5" x 8.5"