Poems by Sudeep Sen
kargil
Our street of smoke and fences, gutters gorged with weed and reeking, scorching iron grooves // of rusted galvanise, a dialect forged from burning asphalt, and a sky that moves // with thunderhead cumuli grumbling with rain, …. — derek walcott, Tiepolo’s Hound, Book One, (II).1 Ten years on, I came searching for war signs of the past expecting remnants — magazine debris, unexploded shells, shrapnels that mark bomb wounds. I came looking for ghosts -- people past, skeletons charred, abandoned brick-wood-cement that once housed them. I could only find whispers -- whispers among the clamour of a small town outpost in full throttle -- everyday chores sketching outward signs of normalcy and life. In that bustle I spot war-lines of a decade ago -- though the storylines are kept buried, wrapped in old newsprint. There is order amid uneasiness -- the muezzin’s cry, the monk’s chant -- baritones merging in their separateness. At the bus station black coughs of exhaust smoke-screen everything. The roads meet and after the crossroad ritual diverge, skating along the undotted lines of control. A porous garland with cracked beads adorns Tiger Hill. Beyond the mountains are dark memories, and beyond them no one knows, and beyond them no one wants to know. Even the flight of birds that wing over their crests don’t know which feathers to down. Chameleon-like they fly, tracing perfect parabolas. I look up and calculate their exact arc and find instead, a flawed theorem. grammar she has no english; her lips round / in a moan .... calligraphy of veins .... — merlinda bobis, ‘First Night’ My syntax, tightly-wrought -- I struggle to let go, to let go of its formality, of my wishbone desiring juice -- its deep marrow, muscle, and skin. The sentence finally pronounced -- I am greedy for long drawn- out vowels, for consonants that desire lust, tissue, grey-cells. I am hungry for love, for pleasure, for flight, for a story essaying endlessly — words. A comma decides to pr[e]oposition a full-stop ... ellipses pause, to reflect -- a phrase decides not to reveal her thoughts after all — ellipses and semi-colons are strange bed-fellows. Calligraphy of veins and words require ink, the ink of breath, of blood — corpuscles speeding faster than the loop of serifs ... the unresolved story of our lives in a fast train without terminals. I long only for italicised ellipses ... my english is the other, the other is really english — she has no english; her lips round / in a moan -- oval, rich, nuanced, grammar- drenched, etched letters of glass. |
About the poet
Sudeep Sen [www.sudeepsen.net] is widely recognised as a major new generation voice in world literature and ‘one of the finest younger English-language poets in the international literary scene’ (BBC Radio), ‘fascinated not just by language but the possibilities of language’ (Scotland on Sunday). He received a Pleiades Honour (at the Struga Poetry Festival, Macedonia) for having made “a significant contribution to contemporary world poetry”. Sen’s prize-winning books include: Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins), Distracted Geographies, Rain, Aria (A K Ramanujan Translation Award), Ladakh, The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry (editor), and Fractals: New & Selected Poems|Translations 1980-2015. A new book, Blue Nude: New Selected Poems (Jorge Zalamea International Poetry Prize) is forthcoming. His poems, translated into twenty-five languages, have featured in major international anthologies; and his words have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Newsweek, Guardian, Observer, Independent, Telegraph, Herald, Harvard Review, Hindu, Hindustan Times, Times of India, Outlook, India Today, and broadcast on bbc, pbs, cnn ibn, ndtv, air & Doordarshan. Sen’s newer work appears in New Writing 15 (Granta), Language for a New Century (Norton), Leela (Collins), Indian Love Poems (Knopf/Random House/Everyman), Out of Bounds (Bloodaxe), and Initiate: Oxford New Writing (Blackwell). He is the editorial director of aark arts and the editor of Atlas. |