sudeep sen tasted publishing for the first time in a quiet and modest way. In 1983, at nineteen years, he compiled a collection of his fledgling verse, put out as a limited edition volume entitled Leaning Against the Lamp Post which was made possible due to his grandfather's support and generosity. A more recent edition of the volume has appeared this year and it is a critical anthology, (in much the same way as T S Eliot's recently published book of early poems, Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917 ), because of what it says to us about Sen's talent and his poetic inclination at an early age.

            What is obvious at first glance is that Sudeep Sen's development as a poet is less notable in his formal dexterity than it is in his maturing vision in a certain confidence of voice and vision. I say this because his early work, those poems collected in Leaning Against the Lamp Post display an uncanny formal competence that has come to be the trade mark of Sen's work. As early as these early works, one notes Sen's fascination with the line, the delicately wrought end-rhyme, half-rhyme, and the more sophisticated use of stanza variation to create a visual and rhythmic complexity. There are poems in this volume that are decidedly experimental, particularly the concrete poems that experiment with lineation and stanza usage in interesting ways. There are few pieces which are understandably juvenile at this stage. However, a reader who follows the basic patterns of meaning in these poems will see immediately, that Sen has already answered the question of what makes a poem a poem quite early on. His formal apprenticeship rescues us from poems that are deeply lyrical and sentimental in the confessional tone (although the reader senses that even at that age, Sen had the good sense to know what poems to omit from a collection and which to keep -- he kept the poems that represented effectively veiled confessions). These early poems serves as fascinating indication of Sen's obsession with control, with symmetry and order -- the kind of meticulous detail that only a maturing vision could smooth into poetic song of immense grace and eloquence.

            The thematic forms of these early poems also point to what will become Sen's trade mark fascination with the business of writing itself. Indeed, a strand of Sen's poetry is immensely self-conscious about the act of writing, the very act of composing poetry. The effect is an ironic quality that never slips into pure self-deprecation, but remains nicely balanced around the themes of humility and self-importance.

            By the time Sen came to compile the poems for The Lunar Visitations, his first official book of poems (that was published as a result of winning an international poetry competition), we are beginning to see a maturing vision and a daring, a willingness to tackle complex issues of love, of death, of politics, and, the meaning of politics in society. Having lived in India for most of his life, Sudeep Sen has seen a range of political and social realities that have a significant impact on his poetry. Poverty, wealth, cultural depth and tradition, colonialism and its legacy, political intrigue and the remarkable business of civil and religious strife have all been part of Sen's life as an Indian. These elements enter his poetic space in a manner that is never overbearing or easily pigeon-holed, for above all, Sen represents a distinctive generation of writers from India that was born into an independent nation, a generation that would dialogue more directly and confidently outside of the paradigm of England-India, but that would include America and the rest of Europe; a generation born into a literary tradition that was no longer struggling to wrest itself from colonial mimicry, but that was increasingly interested in speaking to the inner language of a society in languages of its own.

            The poems in The Lunar Visitations range from the powerfully imagistic `Valley of the Gods', an intimation on the meaning of mortality: death, reason and passion couched in an autobiographical narrative set in Colorado; to the lyrical intimation of love, `The Lovers and the Moon', to the clearly political and deeply fatalistic `Calcutta Vignettes' which contains one of Sen's more brilliant passages which emblematise the convergence of the sacred and the profane, art and stark reality:

              Far away behind the Park Circus graveyard
               where death overrides the dirge, sits a prophet,
            his skeletal figure cracking.
               He ploughs his bony hands
            through a bowl of boiled rice,

              grain by grain, with a hope
               that tomorrow may be brighter than today.
            How long will the people here recline and bask
               "in thy days of glory past,"
            of Dutts, Derozios and Tagores?                      

              In The Lunar Visitations, Sen employs a mystic poetic construct of light and dark, of the cycles of the moon to create poetry that allows itself the flight of lunacy and the order and reliability of the coming of day and night.  But it is in the business of locating in his work the capacity to contain a range of ideas and experiences that we find the poet's constant character.  What he says of Calcutta is true of his verse: "One can find all these in Calcutta -- / filth, flies, people, poverty, rags, riches, / hundreds of hungry children in the streets, / thousands of them about to be born, / and the rest of them in the chawls, and more."             (back to top)

            The Lunar Visitations also had a distinct agenda that may have been quite conscious on the part Sen. It sought to break from the cliched expectations among many about what constituted "Indian" poetry. Sen's work defied the stereotype of works that would be fully rooted in the business of post-colonial angst. Rather than a foregrounded engagement, Sen opted for poetry that was simply involved in the pleasure of itself; poetry willing to locate its centre in a range of landscapes.

            His next collection of poetry, Kali in Ottava Rima appears, by its title at least, to be extending this agenda. The marriage of Kali, the Indian deity with the Italian poetic form of ottava rima -- a complex form that sits at the centre of the Western tradition, Sen appears to be drawing attention to his comfort with multiple traditions.  Thematically, however, this volume of poems amounted to a departure from the very mytho-surreal poems of The Lunar Visitations. All the poems in this volume explored themes that could be, at a basic level, described as Indian. There is the political piece `Mid-Term Polls, Yet Again' which amounts to a cynical look at the twisted absurdities of the democratic system in Indian life; and then there is powerfully rendered `Durga Puja' which celebrates in eloquently long lines and with a delicately wrought rhyme scheme the praise of Hindu gods and goddesses. The alternating rhyming couplets draw their essential cadence from the Sanskrit sloka structure, thereby enhancing the incantatory quality. The poem becomes a philosophical study of the meaning of existence, the value of belief: "perhaps to forget // the life around, but perhaps to believe that really, without fear, / the life force still lives, that the celestial cycles still exist ...." In Kali in Ottava Rima, Sen makes it quite clear that his poetic influences and the spiritual grounding for his poetic expression is quite rooted in the Indian experience.  The sophistication with which he invokes the myths of India, and the manner in which these are then set against a passionate dialogue about the poetics of meaning offers the reader a greater sense of the depth of Sen's poetic vision.

            Sudeep Sen's fourth collection New York Times was first published by John Welch of The Many Press, London in 1993. [The Indian edition (along with Kali in Ottava Rima in the same volume) was subsequently published by Rupa in 1995]. In this collection, Sen appears to return to many of the themes explored in The Lunar Visitations, [also published in India by Rupa], among them a strong sense of life in America -- in this case, life in New York City. This unifying theme allows Sen to position himself in a city in which he feels at once alienated and welcomed. The effect is a study of one poet's profoundly felt reaction to a familiar landscape. The combination of alienation and belonging, places the collection in the realm of a certain existentialist and modernist poetry, but the value of the poetry does not lie as much in what we learn about New York, but in what we learn about the instincts of a poet bombarded by images, ideas and the drive to record these emotions and experiences.  The result is poetry rich in control and symmetry.

            The title poem's overall ‘abxba cdxdc efxfe ghxhg ijxji ...’ rhyme scheme that Sen has invented for this poem, consists of five-line stanzas corresponding to the city's five boroughs (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens, Staten Island), with the central ‘x’ line acting as a mirror-line reflecting both the other pairs of lines on either sides. It becomes even more remarkable when we find out that when each stanza is rotated on its central axis by 180 degrees, the resulting shape alludes to the topographical silhouette of the island of  Manhattan itself, as well as the skyline and  its reflection on River Hudson. Here is the poem in full:

  Every morning in relentless hurry, I scurry
through the streets of New York, turn around the avenue, flee
                        pass the red and white awning of the Jewish deli,
            walk out with a bagel or croissant or spilled coffee,
            disappearing underground in a flurry,

  speeding in a subway of mute faces, barely swallowed the bagel-bite,
barely unfolded The Times, barely awake.
                        Before I realise, it's lunch-time,
            and then evening, late,
            being herded home with the flow of humankind,

  up and down elevators, escalators, staircases, and ramps. I am
back on the streets again, late night,
                        though early enough to glance at the headlines
            of next morning's paper. In this city, I
            count the passage of time only by weekends

  linked by five-day flashes I don't
even remember. In this city where walking means
                        running, driving means speeding, there seem to exist
            many days in one, an ironical and oblique
            efficiency. But somewhere, somehow, time takes its toll,

  malnourished, overburdened, and overutilized,
as the tunnels seeping under the river's belly slowly cave
                        in, the girders lose their tension like old dentures, and
            the underground rattles with the passing of every train.
            After all, how long can one stretch time?

  Illusions can lengthen, credit ratings strengthen,
even Manhattan elongates with every land-fill,
                        but not time, it takes its own time, still,
            the way it always has and always will,
            not a second more, not a second less.

              But the volume is also marked by a tenderness of image as is clear in the poem `Sulphur'. Here is the opening section:

              At dawn on Riverside Drive, after the frost
            clears the trees, bare twigs usually glisten

              at their ends, and remnant water globules
            soon disappear at the call of the sun.

              green sulphur on match-heads
            glowing at the very first hint of light.

              Sen is not immune, in this collection, of feeling for the painful under-side of the city.  His poems examine the neurotic world of close quarters, poverty, deprivation and anonymity.  The most striking quality of New York Times, tellingly, is Sen's fascination with the landscape and the way in which it defines sentiment and contains the record of his having lived in that world.  `New York Times' becomes his praise poem for America and the sentiment is quite clear, America offers Sen a way to encounter the landscape as a lone figure, as an isolated poet able to immerse himself in the intensity of an image, free from the press of humanity. The metaphor is one that remains true of all of Sudeep Sen's poetry.                    (back to top)

            In 1993, the Scottish Poetry Library where Sen was a writer-in-residence, released Parallel—a compact disc and audio cassette recording of Sudeep Sen reading from some of his work. The value of this recording lies in the manner in which it demonstrates the extent to which Sen's poetry is written often with the cadence of the human voice at the heart of it.  Sen's rendering of his verse is subdued but imbued with a nuanced interpretation of his rhythmic score that enhances our appreciation of what he is trying to do in the poetry on the page.  In his reading of `New York Times' for instance, there is a breathless quality of the chaos of New York life that is captured in the recording, while the imagistic enigma of the poem `One Moonlit December Night' leaves us in a state of frozen suspension. Among the most moving of the poems recorded, is the poem that opens The Lunar Visitations, `A Pilgrimage to Mathura', in which Sen's tone is round, but deeply morose, filled with a world weariness that allows the core meaning of the poem: the way myth and fantasy must give way to stark and painful reality of existence. There is a haunting quality to the refrain, "One paid the price, the other didn't have to. / One carried the virus, the other got injected." The poem ends with an image of mystery and fantasy being yanked down by ponderous reality -- Sen's reading captures this duality, this tension:

              There was a river, and a holy one too.
            The Jamuna, with all its celestial allusions,
            watered and gorged the earth, flowed on.
            Old, maybe older than the city,
            it washed Pilate's hands of everything.

              A bird, one of the migratory species,
            came here for a new season.
            But the stranger and the bird
            soon left the city to find the Truth,
            while millions came here to find the same.

              In 1994, Sen published two slim volumes of poetry of considerable importance. South African Woodcut contains a movement of poems written after a reading tour to South Africa by Sen, just before the historic elections were to take place. In it, Sen sustains his formal inclinations, but begins to grow more daring and venturesome in his treatment of themes of race (`Daguerreotype', `Durban'), identity (`Colour Bar'), and, the politics of society (`Independent Homeland'). It is inevitable that South Africa at this important juncture in time would invoke such themes in Sen, but these issues, while passionately explored by Sen in many of the poems, are paralleled by his constant fascination with the meaning of art and its value in society, its value in life, something which he explores in poems like `South African Woodcut' in which the artificial mask of the South African dancer-dramatist becomes a metaphor for the inscrutable mask of indifference on the face of black South Africans that unnerves white South Africa. Here, art becomes a way of creating silence and using that silence to effect change:

              ....  But this mask, masks much more: the glaze
               of the rural varnish and the herb-paint's

              primal colours preserves the ritual, anointing the
               face, charting history's altered course.  On the

              new stage, this face has more power in its passivity,
               more emotion in its muted, saintly serenity.

              In `Dargle Valley, Midlands Meander', Sen studies a piece of pottery and questions the traditional Keatsian elevation of the inanimate piece of art as immortal by placing it against the compelling power of life lived, or moving, flowing life. He ends with compromise -- the two must evoke a reason for living, for going on.

            The second volume published in 1994 is a sequence of poems based on illustrations done by Peter Standen, a British artist born in 1938, about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.  Standen's etchings are almost naive and simple frame by frame -- but their complexity lies in the narrative they chart -- the movement of a couple from living lovers, to buried lovers, to artifacts in a museum. This movement from life through tragedy to art is perfectly suited to Sen's own vision of existence and the place of art in that context, consequently, the poems that emerge from this stimulus replicate the terse economy of Standen's art, and the complexity of image and narrative. The effect is a poem of subdued power and poignancy. Sen avoids the trap of simply re-telling the narrative offered by the etchings. His agenda is to distill, to find the heart of the narrative, to take it and to ferret out all the nuances and ironies contained therein.  His project, also, is to create a veritable drama, albeit a staid and profoundly restrained one that offers an at once reassuring and disturbing vision of the world.  For Sen, the poem is an artifact -- a kind of relic of human experience, and yet it remains an undeniable vehicle for expressing human emotions and thoughts. The poem, then, is at once static and living. This dualism is central to Sen's imagination and rests at the core of this movement of poems.  Mount Vesuvius, the volcanic mountain, possesses similar dualities of dormancy and activity, but above all, the mountain does not move -- it remains constant, defying human experience, defying the elements, defying its own instinct for self-destruction. It is in the face of this constancy, that the mutability of the human condition is articulated in the opening couplets of the poem:

                  bear an insidious resemblance, that belie
                   shifting shadows in the subterranean alley.

                  Death has an invisible presence,
                   so does life, in its incipience and its ends,

                  linked, like two inverted arches, bent
                   to meet in a circle at their ends.
                                                                                             (back to top)

  Mount Vesuvius in Eight Frames was dramatised on BBC Radio in 1995 as a verse play. In a haunting and moving production, the voices of the three readers (acting out the parts of man, woman, and the chorus), were beautifully complemented by the evocative minimalist music of David Sylvian and the astonishing archival soundtrack of the Vesuvian eruption.  

            A year later, Peepal Tree Books published one of Sen's longest volumes of poetry, Dali's Twisted Hand. In many ways, this volume is the perfect introduction to the poetry of Sudeep Sen because it contains poems that explore the range and complexity of Sen's work.  It reflects his significant capacity as a formalist, his thematic range and his maturing vision.  There are poems in this volume that chart his various journeys throughout the world and his many encounters with poets and artists. Here we see poems about the politics of life, poems about the place of art in life, poems about love, poems about poetry and its value, and poems that demonstrate Sen's constant uneasiness with the legacy of art.  In Dali's Twisted Hands, we have a sense that Sudeep Sen is trying to chart all of existence in a series of organized images, images that allow the simpler things in life to suddenly come alive with multiple meanings and implications.  Here, his Indian world merges most comfortably with a range of `other' worlds including the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, and others.  Varied landscapes but a constant theme of the poet in the midst of that landscape.

            If there is a progression in Sen's work it would lie in the confidence he has in allowing the human voice to temper the precision of his form.  Here the language assumes a simpler tone to create a deeply moving series of articulations.  The themes of earlier poems are extended: political concerns emerge with pathos in poems like `Calcutta', `During the Street Play', and `Berlin' -- all moving evocations of the place of the human in the larger political order. There is a sense of deep feeling in these poems, the kind of empathetic tone that is largely spiritual.  In `The Box Office Hit' for instance, the persona listens intently to the philosophical profundities of everyday speech, finding that the discovery of meaning in the talk of everyday people does not depend on the intellectual or the poet -- indeed the man who waits in line to see a film for the umpteenth time understands that he is partaking in a process of myth-making, a flight of fantasy which allows him to contend with the hardships of everyday life:

                 "Bahoot baria philum, ek dum dream-like",
            nothing like his own life,

                 this seven-buck fantasy flight,
            he explains. This evening, late,
               after the show is over, he trudges home,

                 again next morning to the factory groans,
            every line memorized, even in his dreams,
               just as in the film, as usual.

  In snippets like these, we begin to understand the development of Sen's voice, his increased confidence and certainty about what is valuable and effective in the poem. There is an efficiency that does not announce itself because he has found the beauty of the experience to be the central value of the poem. The poem becomes, then, a vehicle, a well-tuned, carefully honed vehicle that carries the vision of the poet.

            Sen's Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems patterns Dali’s Twisted Hands in its avoidance of a totalizing and informing theme. The new poems in this book are structured around experience, but now experience becomes far more intimate and the poet is decidedly more daring in the issues he explores.  He returns to the Indian landscape as an adult returns to childhood haunts. In `Old Room' we observe Sen's inimitable manner of making a memory poem a poem layered with meanings, not the least of which has to do with writing and the influences that shape his writing.

                 I see old books now rearranged,
            marked pages unmark themselves,
               tightly wrought phrases uncoil,
            as old texts come alive,
               not new, not old,
            but aged, undead, and memorised.

              In `Flying Home', the return is brilliantly captured by a subtle acknowledgment of mortality and eternity in the same breath -- "my body is the step-son of my soul" -- divided in this way, the soul and the body will part. Yet the articulation of this parting is the source, not of regret, but of belief, of pleasure and resilience, and the source of art. Here is the poem:

              I meticulously stitch time through the embroidered sky,
              through its unpredictable lumps and hollows. I

            am going home once again from another
              home, escaping the weave of reality into another

              one, one that gently reminds and stalls
              to confirm: my body is the step-son of my soul.

              But what talk of soul and skin
              in this day and age, such ephemeral things

              that cross-weaves blood and breath
              into clotted zones of true escape.

              What talk of flight time and flying
              when real flights of fancy are crying

              to stay buoyant unpredictably in mid-air
              amid pain, peace, and belief: just like thin air

              sketches, where another home is built
              in free space vacuum, as another patchwork quilt

              is quietly wrapped around, gently, in memoriam.

  There is a passion, a strong need to devour experience to speak of such experience in verse.  This energy is tempered only by the pleasure Sen seems to get in the organization of words.  His poems are singing with greater melodic assurance, and the images indeed take flight.

            It is perhaps a poem like the `Bharatanatyam Dancer' in Postmarked India that epitomises so much of what Sen's poetry is about. It also displays his sheer talent for formal invention and execution. The abacca...dbdeed...fbfggf... rhyme scheme maps and mirrors the actual classical dance step-pattern and beat of   ta dhin ta thaye thaye ta ....  Also, the left-hand margin indentations match the same scheme and form. Here is stanza 3 of the poem:

              The raw brightness of kanjeevaram silk, of
                 your breath, and the nobility of antique silver
            adorns you and your dance, reminding us of
               the treasure chest that is only
               half-exposed, disclosed just enough, barely --
            for art in its purest form never reveals all.

  The poem is about art, classical and modern, it is about politics and philosophy, but equally important, it is about passion and what is quietly personal and essential.

              In 1999, 2000, and 2001, Sudeep Sen published several chapbooks of his poems—Retracing American Contours: 1987-90, Almanac, Lines of Desire; translations—In Another Tongue, and, Love and other poems by Aminur Rahman; and edited several books—Hayat Saif: Selected Poems; The British Council Book of Emerging English Poets from Bamgladesh; and, Modern English Poems from Bangladesh.

              The publication of Sen's first major collection, The Lunar Visitation met with universal praise offers by some very significant individuals. Almost by every reviewer, Sen's work has been praised for its formal competence and maturity of tone.

            One of the most expansive and useful introduction to Sen's work is Mario Relich's critical appraisal of his work in an essay titled `Visual Reality & A Craftsman's Odyssey: The Poetry of Sudeep Sen' in the journal Paterson Literary Review (USA: No 28, 1999) [reprinted in World Literature Written in English (Singapore: 1999) and Kavya Bharati (India: No 11, 1999)], as well as in a review article published in World Literature Today. In these highly complimentary and erudite pieces, Relich speaks of Sen as belonging to the same group as the young novelist Vikram Seth who has had a significant impact on the publishing world with his mammoth work of fiction. Relich sees in Sen the complete picture of the poet, but he is especially drawn by Sen's "universality", and the quality of accessibility, passion, and depth, that has made Sudeep Sen extremely popular among poets living and working outside of India, as well as in India. Relich writes, "Like Vikram Seth, Sudeep Sen has been meteoric in his impact as a young Indian poet writing in English .... Unmistakable voice, austere verbal ingenuity .... Facility and fluency with formal structure—sonnet, rhyming couplets and quatrains, terza rima, delicate half-rhymes .... Deep-rooted in his poetry reside the subtle fusion of the global and the national, the historical and the contemporary, myth and scholarship, craft and lyricism."

            Curiously reviewers in India have noted his "cross-over" capacity as well, and this, not in a negative light. In a review in The Times of India, one reviewer describes Sen as one who "gives us cross-cultural experiences: rituals and customs of a Hindu past and the modern pace of the West. For those high prophets of poetic craft, The Lunar Visitations holds great promise."

            Some critics have found it necessary to attach Sen to the names of some great poets and writers of the past and the present. Most notable are a reviewer in The Economic Times who suggests that the poem `New York Times' belongs "to the tradition of T.S. Eliot's `Preludes', and Angus Calder's generous linking of Sen with Louis MacNeice: "At 29, he is probably as good as Louis MacNeice was at that age, and he often reminds me of `the drunkenness of being various'". Calder's comments appeared in The Scotsman. 

            Alan Riach in an incisive review essay titled `The Poetry of Sudeep Sen' in the Lines Review wrote: "Sudeep Sen's writing [like Joseph Conrad's] displays a similar singularity of rhythmic and linguistic habit. Like Conrad, and indeed like so many Scottish writers, English belongs to him, but he uses it in a way no Englishman ever could, and his writing is often so much the better and certainly none the worse for that ..... [His] writing is in a line of descent from Conrad's as much as it is from Rushdie's. It self-consciously aims at, and frequently achieves, mesmerizing rhythms .... Reading the poems is a cool draught of language uncontaminated by the posturings of Sen's English contemporaries, the mannerisms and stylistic pirouettes of the native inheritors of Shakespeare, Tennyson and Eliot. Sen inherits these writers obliquely, and is thus free from their more insidious bequests."

            Reviewers in India and those outside of India who have followed Sen's work generally agree that he is one of a few poets pioneering a new idiom in Indian literature. The central characteristic of this trend is a tendency to have an expansive, more global and decidedly less parochial palette from which to create. It is a development that places Sen alongside other trans-national writers from non-Western countries like Ben Okri from Nigeria, Fred D'Aguiar from Guyana, Kazuo Ishiguro from Japan, Michael Ondaatje from Sri Lanka, and Vikram Seth from India, to name only a few.

            Sen's work has been very widely and well reviewed (in fact I identified more than 250 entries on his work while compiling this essay/sourcebook), but there is a tremendous amount of detailed study of his oeuvre that is still pending. A few studies are actually being done at the moment and should appear in due course.

            As a literary columnist, editor, reviewer and critic, Sen has published extensively and significantly, especially on Indian and South Asian writing. A selection of his non-fiction writings that include criticism, essays, interviews, literary journalism, and travel writing, is forthcoming as book of selected prose, Tracing Lines. The Wasafiri Contemporary Writing from India, South Asia & The Diaspora, Lines Review Twelve Modern Young Indian Poets, and, Modern English Poetry from Bangladesh, are three important ground-breaking anthologies he has edited recently. As a poet he has charted new territories, invented new forms, and introduced a "new idiom" in contemporary English-language poetry. Therefore, it is entirely appropriate and not at all surprising that one of the leading international poets in India, Dom Moraes, wrote in Sunday Mid Day that Sudeep Sen is "a gifted poet .... [and] I think everyone who works in Indian literature in English should thank him for all he has done".                                      (back to top)