A well-known figure in the literary circuit, Sudeep Sen has been different things at different times: poet, photographer and editor to name just a few. Gathering together choice pickings from his earlier work, Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems, and the cumulative creative outpourings of many decades comes Fractals, a book of vast magnitude. An eclectic collection with rambling prose-poetry musings, pieces of soliloquy, translations, haiku, traditional and experimental poetry, and flitting between Shanghai, Pondicherry, Alexandria, the Scottish Highlands, Ladakh, Jerusalem and other places, Fractals travels huge distances, both geographically and philosophically. Sen is acutely sensitive while plumbing the deepest and most obtuse of human emotions and he perceives poetry in even the most astonishing of places—a hospital, in an enameled lampshade. The poem “Choice”, a finely tuned orchestra on loss, deception and despair, ends on a note of stoic acceptance on the part of the poet; “…someone else’s nirvana thrust upon me...,” concludes Sen. In contrast, the haiku triptych ‘Rabindra Tagore’, a subtly humorous look at the great man’s creative struggles, is hugely refreshing.
Some of the poems are spun around the most mundane trivia like human anatomy, sickness, medicine, Chinese calligraphy and grammar (“ellipses and semi-colons are strange bed-fellows”) while some others revolve around great artists (Picasso, Cezanne and others) and their works of art. Embellished with quotes from the great poets of old, Fractals is a treasure chest. Sen is particularly good when capturing the essence of a place, a mood, a time, a certain quality of light and one can vividly visualise the silent snowy landscape in the poem ‘Zoji La Pass’. A fondness for certain words is evident in the exquisitely crafted lines—aria, enjambment, iamb—and the poet’s sensibilities play themselves out over and over again. Fractals, consequently, is a befitting title for this collection. Divided into various sections, the focal point of Fractals is the Blue Nude sequence inspired by Henri Matisse’s cobalt blue series.
Here is a poet who likes to experiment, frequently marrying science with art. The physical sciences constantly superimpose themselves on the aesthetic creating a disconcerting kind of fusion poetry that draws its magic from things like blood, bones, tissues, photons and graphite. In ‘Mohiniyattam’ and ‘Bharatanatyam Dancer’, Sen connects the dance rhythm with linguistic line-end rhyme schemes. Though largely non-judgmental and apolitical, the poems ‘During the Street Play’ (inspired by the political playwright Safdar Hashmi) and ‘Circumcision’ stand out firmly against religious and political atrocities. Bengali readers will delight in the poem ‘Eating Rice & Fish’ while a clever poem on the game of cricket hits a resounding six! Some poems revolving around meetings with old friends and fellow poets are intensely private and could leave the reader feeling slightly alienated. The translation section, paying homage to great poets like Gulzar, Kaifi Azmi, Jibananda Das and others, adhere loyally to the original train of thoughts.
The prose-poetry pieces are the highlight of this collection with the poet following his meandering thoughts carefully and sometimes, with a strange detachment. There is a very international feel to the book and what emerges from this collection is a clear insight into the workings of a poet’s mind. Here is a person who intensely inhabits every waking moment and has an insatiable curiosity for the world around and within him. The malady of existential and creative confusion is perennial, the human body as a finite entity and the riddles underlying human relationships constantly entwine and rear their heads, python like.
With a large section of poems dedicated to the rains, Fractals could not have come out at a better time. The drumming of raindrops, memorable lines and the reader’s cup, very happily, runneth over.