DEEPENING GROOVE (National Poetry Review Press, 2011)
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"The poems in Deepening Groove proceed in elegant triplets that drift effortlessly down the page on waves of sound, serenely self-confident. The subjects are animals, trees, flowers, fish, the weather, and the human condition, all mixed up in a heady stew that simmers quietly one minute, and shimmers brightly the next. This is a book of savvy, delicious surprises." -Wyn Cooper "In Deepening Groove, Ravi Shankar's poems are small wonders of defining, seeing, and sound. He is a poet fascinated with transformations and here are shiftings of dust and sand, loon calls, flutterings of insects, changing tides and splendid cascades- always information-driven, often rapturous with Hopkins-like intensities, imperatives, and trochaic stresses. What I'm most taken by is how the poems both see and feel simultaneously: In "Dark," "Darkness in New England has a flavor close / to anise, a texture plush as peat moss." In "Bats," the bats' flight is "carrying away pieces of us, / a maelstrom too faint to see, turning to ellipsis...." In virtually all these poems, to quote words from "Willard Pond," there is "a sense // that the distance between the alternate / universes humans" [and other creatures on Earth] "inhabit is smaller / than ever imagined and more astonishing." And although the poems give special pleasures on first encounters, they contain-as in "The Oyster"-"secrets that require / a knife to pry open and vinegar to serve." Deepening Groove shows Ravi Shankar is truly, now, one of America's finest younger poets." -Dick Allen
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