SOURCE: A review of All You Who Sleep Tonight, in World Literature Today, Vol. 65, No. 3, Summer, 1991, pp. 549-50.

Perry is an American educator and critic. In the following review, he complains that the poems in All You Who Sleep Tonight are drab and uninspired.

Even a thin volume of thin poems could be enough to keep the reading public aware of Vikram Seth after the "phenomenal success" of his Byronesque, semisatiric, semiromantic novel in verse, The Golden Gate, five years ago.

The longest piece here (twenty-eight four-line stanzas) is termed "a pendant (as it were)" to that work, but it is neither cast in a similar vein (except for a final clever quip) nor marked with a similar narrative verve, being instead rather drably descriptive, uninspired historical and moral commentary. It is surely a mistake to ask for repeat performances from writers. Still, in form the poems of...