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Vidyan Ravinthiran
Vidyan was born in Leeds and studies in Oxford, where he serves as Poetry Editor of the Oxonian Review. His debut pamphlet introduces a vivid and multi-textured style to
British poetry, rife with themes of sexual intimacy, race and
the individual's position in a landscape, whether that might
be one of freedom or restriction.
publications:
Vidyan's poems are a heady mixture of exotic language and strangely real personal experience, cemented together by a verbal wit and a winning, amused half-mockery. They are a delight.
Bernard O'Donoghue
The angel of dream-work from at home or nowhere
Gently, I emancipate the paperback loosely gripped
still by one trailing hand, riffling the pages with
that well-worn, windy motif that means time passing.
A few rubber shreds leave long shadows
aslant your thigh-smooth page in the lamplight;
the typeface is paler here where you’ve erased
some deep underlining that presses through
to the verso, so a little ridge highlights the shadow
phrase
I’ll fit to the furrow scrowed between your eyebrows,
as if a dog-eared page could forget its place
like pillows shunted numbly off the mattress
or that one bare shoulder wrangled free of your t-shirt
– deferring, for the moment, those archetypal ley-lines
a second reading may gently activate.