Facts for Visitors: Poems Book

The book begins with a succinct, odd and unobfuscated language set in a poetic do-si-do: "Burial Practice" is a genesis story -- physical, intellectual, then cultural. The poem suggests the poet Srikanth Reddy is a builder. He builds in brick-by-brick phrases -- "pulse" to "pause", a ritualistic "then" starting most lines, almost chanting, and the also-brick-like symbols in the pivotal spaces between stanzas round out the concept. By the first poem he's already invoked the Holy Bible, and before long, he's conjuring Dante's Inferno, William Shakespeare, and maybe Stephen Hawking and John James Audobon. And, we couldn't really be without it this fall, and wouldn't want to -- bees.

Looking further into the pages of the book, there is the curious "Corruption", which we learn is inspired by Saint Augustine, among others. All-'telling', the action and scene tucks inside the process that the writer ever-so-writerly points out. 'Deft' is the word I can use to compliment this piece -- in how Reddy states he will tell a psalm ... which is not a psalm, or wouldn't be if Reddy hadn't asserted that it was. The poem is many things at once, though never one thing entirely.

After some time getting to know Reddy's work, I saw this kind of braiding or woven-ness as a emergent theme. I was taking notes repeatedly asking myself to remember "matryoshkas" or Russian nesting dolls; telescopes to look at the stars, their levels evolving upward into ziggurats of lenses; and the "exploded view" (an idea I remembered from the title of a Sandy Beach poem). I'm more comfortable thinking of it as nesting dolls rather than braids. Here, there are so many seeds inside seeds.

Reddy's rhyme-play and sound-alikes are very prominent. The rhymes and the brick-setting continues in "Loose Strife with Apiary". Reddy writes: "books on bookkeeping, on being, on coping & beekeeping". He suggests that the result of bees' work is "recycled cosmos", figuring pollen as stars, amalgamated. Barring immediate analysis because I'd rather go with the gut than parse: Incredible, brilliant work. Another poem to get that "incredible!" denotation was on page 11 (already) called "Evening With Stars". It has so many atmospheres that layer upon each other -- a case in point, a myth, an apocryphal story, a dream, a lie, a nightmare. Or a truth. The characters in "Evening With Stars" aren't really there, and when they are, they all have animal faces. And they are escaping with treasures into the night. I really do love this poem, and so many others in this collection, that I'm actually kind of giddy from it.

Reddy also has a bit of what is surefire to get me involved in the work: the literary gothic. There is a constant thread (or threat) of decay, of disaster. There is always a cloud looming on the horizon, the campfire at the edge of town after it has been obliterated. The shattering of sense, the retrieval of sense, the regained mutant sense. It is that sense of fore-boding that drives the tension in the work. It plays into that part of us as humans that enjoys watching something become destroyed, or at least to imagine what can't be broken, through time-lapse photography; the evening news; family reunions.

"Facts for Visitors" was a damn good book.