Book review: ‘Fractals’
Sen's voice is consistently understated in this poetry omnibus, spanning 35 years
I like big books and I cannot lie. Reading Fractals is like entering a recursive rabbit hole of Béla Tarr rain, and petrichor in a world replete with Matisse madness. It’s an exploration of the poet’s virtuosity, a fine blend of language, rhythm and syntax.
The first thing that strikes you is Sudeep Sen’s antiquarian eye for detail. The sonnet Blue Nude II deftly weaves Matisse’s technique of “painting with scissors", revealing that the sun’s apogee/ has disappeared, unlighting the parts/ previously lit by passion’s heat.
Fractals should be viewed with an aesthete’s eye for its architecture, art of the lapidary typography and structure. Flaubert said, “Poetry is as exact a science as geometry." Sen bisects his poem Suspended Particles in parallel columns, each word airborne like a striated dust-ray:
Two shafts A lost bee
of sunlight drones in
bisect through
this room — the window
Dali’s Pâte de Verre is a significant poem. It brings innovative glass making and the Art Nouveau movement to life. Each stanza reminds us of the enigma of a photograph: it’s missing shape like an absent mannequin/ mimics complications of an empty hanger —/ the hollow hold of a death-mask.
These lines have the startling absurdity of a Man Ray Rayograph. It’s a montage of whimsical objects betraying convulsive beauty—an empty hanger, a death mask being revealed simultaneously by light. Absence suddenly becomes a visual image, a missing shape, a ghost mannequin. This poem’s second stanza is antithetical as it is laced with a stillness that anticipates motion, like an indecisive Saul Leiter moment: the frame vertical, the colour chromatic. Hues unfurl magically, like broken bangles—kaleidoscopic; orange to green to brown to black.
Sen’s voice is consistently understated and subtle. While reading the book at intermittent intervals, I longed for some seismic tremor, I was looking for a Baudelairian “green-sickness", a “troubled voluptuousness". It was right there in Sun-Blanched Blood:
...the nib of writing itself/ Underneath the permanent scar/ of jet black fluid and heat/ is pulp, half dead./ ...It is mid-afternoon,/ and I too lie dead-/ still, blanched, bloodied.
While these lines seem uncannily close to a scene from a Quentin Tarantino or Coen Brothers film, the entire poem remains muted, lurking in the reader’s mind like an ever-foreboding threat of the untoward. Sen compels us to notice these disturbances.
One of my favourites, Postcards, is a constellation of many things: lost art of epistolary etiquette, drafts of air, unnamed space between diurnal and nocturnal states, stasis, cinema, and an account of how time passes, often unremarkably.
Fractals should be read for all its splendour; for its variations on classical Japanese Waka form; for a surprising lack of rococo vocabulary in his interpretation of art, an ekphrasis section, Blue Nude, covering Cézanne, Picasso and Matisse, rendering them accessible to an uninitiated reader. It should be read for the gorgeous prose-poems in BodyText and Wo|Man, for returning Harappa’s manicured waterways to verse, for Jibanananda Das’s Banalata Sen and others through his absolutely stunning translations.
Fractals is a book to be devoured slowly, one that rewards reading in patient, bite-sized morsels.
Jennifer Robertson co-curates the Cappuccino Poetry Reading Series in Mumbai.
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