[An American educator and critic, King has written extensively on Indian poetry. In the following review, he discusses The Humble Administrator's Garden in relation to postmodernism.]

There was a radical populist form of postmodernism in the 1960s in which modernist high art was seen as the enemy of immediacy, self-expression, and fulfillment; more recently a conservative neoformalism has challenged modernist poetics. Vikram Seth, whose The Humble Administrator's Garden won the new Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Asia, reports on surfaces and the trivia of life in purposefully clichéd language, stereotyped ideas, using such forms as the sonnet, quatrain, and epigrammatic couplet. While some poems are written in free verse, Seth usually writes a monosyllabic, regularly stressed line. A refusal to look inward, a celebration of simple pleasures and of survival, and a half-serious resort to platitude and pastiche for amusement and as defense make Seth a poet of our time, when eclecticism, historicism, and self-aware artifice are associated with postmodernism.

The Humble Administrator's Garden is divided into poems about China, where Seth studied for two years; India, where he was born and raised; and California, where he now lives. Images of national trees and leaves are used both to unify the volume and to suggest different cultural styles. China appears to be a place to discover universal brotherhood despite cultural differences, India is a land of memories and lost relations, but America despite all its comforts and pleasures is lonely and dangerous. While the Chinese poems are imagistic and atmospheric, tendencies toward chinoiserie are held in check by rigid western stanzaic forms and by worldly wisdom. Often the poems offer analogies to the poetics of their creation. In the title poem ["The Humble Administrator's Garden"], a sonnet, there is a "plump gold carp," a "lily pad," a "Fragrant Chamber," a "Rainbow Bridge," a "willow," a "lotus," and "half a dozen loquats"; but such beauty has been unscrupulously achieved: "He may have got / The means by somewhat dubious means." Administrative practicality creates the self-satisfying poetic art of the garden: "He leans against a willow with a dish / And throws a dumpling to a passing fish."

The personality offered is of a social observer with little revealed inner life; the manner controls such emotions as fear, isolation, envy, and boredom. The California poems refer to loneliness, old letters, former loves, absence, and nostalgia for a foreign (European) past, presumably when Seth was a student at Oxford before coming to America. Emotions are mocked by expressing them platitudinously: "The fact is, this work is as dreary as shit. / I do not like it a bit." "There is so much to do / There isn't any time for feeling blue." Pastiche, rhyme, stanzaic structure, and controlled comedy contribute to a conscious formalism, a display of artifice that purposely lowers the pressure. As in the poetry of Philip Larkin, the lexis is varied to invigorate an unreverberant diction.

Although some of the poems are so laid-back as to be teasingly close to triviality, there is often a threat to survival even when the tone shifts among wit, comedy, humor, and satire to celebrate West Coast American popular culture. The ten six-line stanzas of "Abalone Soup" narrate an evening when friends were diving for abalone in the Pacific ("Eight thirty. Where are they? At nine o'clock / I'll call up next of kin. 'How do you do—/ Mrs. Gebhart? Your son was lost at sea, / A martyr to cuisine.' Ah, abalone"). Seth's sense of exile, of being a world traveler and an East Indian settled in California, must contribute to his awareness of the incongruities of life in contemporary America.

There is a high but eclectic intertextuality in "Ceasing upon the Midnight," which begins with the absurdity of: "He stacks the dishes on the table. / He wants to die, but is unable"; moves through memories of other countries and cultures; and returns to an unromantic alcoholic present: "The bottle lies on the ground. / He sleeps. His sleep is sound." Deftly and ironically maneuvering its way through obvious echoes, the poem imitates the structure, movement, and psychology of the typical grand romantic ode, which is undermined by witty but bland irony, part of a very unromantic poetic: "the rules / of metre, shield him from / Himself." Consequently "To cease upon / / The midnight under the live-oak / Seems too derisory a joke." The style holds off destructive emotions.

The final poem in The Humble Administrator's Garden is "Unclaimed," which epigrammatically comments upon a passing sexual encounter: "To make love with a stranger is the best. / There is no riddle and there is no test." The throw-away manner, like the theme, is a demonstration of a defensive position, "not aching to make sense." Claiming "That this is all there is," Seth controls by deflating romantic urges; he aims at being relaxed, unengaged.

The dampening of emotions, the simultaneous parody and celebration of stereotypes and clichés, has been a fashionable stance in sophisticated pop music. That one of Seth's poems has already been recorded, while others are written in song forms, shows that postmodernists make little distinction between high and mass culture.

While his ideas and style resemble those of Timothy Steele, a poet whom he admires, Seth is less tense, and less metaphysical. For those educated on modernist literature, Seth's poetry can seem shockingly slight and pseudotraditional; but with familiarity the poems deepen to reveal an unexpectedly original contemporary writer.