| Remembering
Hiroshima Tonight
It is full moon in August:
the origami garlands surrounding the park
glitter as the stars, plutonium-twinkle,
remember the fall-out of that sky.
Tonight everyone walks around the solemn arcades
where lovers were once supposed to be.
In the distance, the crown of Mount Fuji sits, clear
on the icy clouds, frozen in time with wisdom.
Suddenly the clouds detonate, and all the petals,
translucent, wet, coalesce: a blossoming mushroom,
peeling softly in a huge slow motion.
But that's only a dream.
Tonight, real flowers are blooming
in the ancient Japanese moonlight.
from
Postmarked India: New &
Selected Poems (HarperCollins, 1997)
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BIOGRAPHY
Sudeep
Sen is
the 2004 recipient of the prestigious ‘Pleiades’ honour at the world’s
oldest poetry festival — the Struga Poetry Evenings, Macedonia — for
having made “significant contribution to modern world poetry”. Sen studied
at St Columba’s School and read literature at Delhi University and in
the USA. As an Inlaks Scholar, he completed an MS from the Graduate
School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York. Winner of many
international and national prizes, he was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship
(UK) and nominated for a Pushcart Prize (USA) for poems included in
Postmarked India: New & Selected
Poems (HarperCollins). More recently, he has published Postcards from Bangladesh, Prayer
Flag, Distracted Geographies,.and Rain.
As an invited author representing his country, he has read his work
worldwide, and has been translated into several languages including
Arabic, Bengali, Czech, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi,
Hungarian, Italian, Korean, Macedonian, Malayalam, Persian, Romanian,
Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.
Sen was an international poet-in-residence at the Scottish Poetry
Library in Edinburgh, and a visiting scholar at Harvard University.
He is the editor of Atlas, editorial director of Aark
Arts, and lives in London and New Delhi.
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Reviews/Comments
on Sudeep Sen's work
‘I
read Rain with considerable admiration and pleasure. It is a word-perfect
collection and its subject matter is both the measure of the rain and
the spoken line’.
AMIT CHAUDHURI
in The Statesman ‘Best Book of the Year’
‘Sudeep Sen’s poems are a present which bring — like all true poetry
— so much companionship’.
JOHN
BERGER, The Ways of Seeing (Penguin & BBC)
‘A highly sophisticated poet’.
KAIFI AZMI,
Selected Poems (Viking Penguin)
Prayer Flag is an unique object of art that reveals two intrinsically
linked artistic sides of Sen’s work and talent: words and images. Perfection
of musicality, tone and cadence is tuned to produce the finest resonance…
a gift to treasure from a master artist.
TOM
ALTER in Biblio
‘Sen has emerged as a leading poet of the English language — has a painter’s
eye when depicting a scene — [commands] superb skill’.
KHUSHWANT
SINGH in Sunday Observer
‘Sen [has] extended the range of Indian verse in English to encompass
a variety of alternative views of language, history and culture’.
Pears
Cyclopaedia 2003 (Penguin)
‘Sen is an eclectic poet whose understated work eschews fashionable
trends, while exhibiting considerable technical virtuosity and versatility’.
JOHN
THIEME in Cambridge Guide to Literature in English [Cambridge University
Press]
‘Sen is amongst the finest younger English-language poets in the international
literary scene. A distinct voice: carefully modulated and skilled, well
measured and crafted’.
GREGOR
ROBERTSON on BBC Radio
`A gifted poet .... I think everyone who works in Indian literature
in English should thank him for all he has done.'
dom moraes in
The Sunday
Mid-Day
`Like Hugh McDiarmid, Sen is fascinated not just by language but by
the possibilities of language. Not for him the plain use of words; each
has to achieve an effect and the result is frequently dazzling ....
Sen's use of language is allied to a sure ear for rhyme and rhythm,
showing an uncanny ability to work his words into formal and finely-tuned
rhyming schemes. Not that he is frightened of invention. His most recent
poems are freer in form, sparer in their construction and as a result
more relaxed, almost as if Sen feels at ease with his talents.'
trevor
royle in
The Scotland on Sunday
`Sen's writing has a freshness ... and an accessibility which are a
sheer delight .... It is a rich and cosmopolitan poetic voice, easy
and fluent, funny, a little patrician, a voice which refreshingly avoids
formal "difficulty", and is able to pick out the tiny detail, the fleeting
moment, which are bore-holes through which both the poet and the reader
can enter a rich and unexpected world of experience .... Sudeep Sen's
poetry is a refreshing and welcome addition to the growing new canon
of Anglo-Indian literature.'
peter bradshaw in
The [London] Evening Standard
`The poet possesses a measure of precision and skill with words which
along with an unfettered imagination, allows him to draw on his erudition
without giving way to any obtrusive influences. In The Lunar Visitations,
the poems veer from realistic narratives to experiments in surrealism
showing the poet's familiarity with craft. He often aims at a lingering
effect.'
The
Independent
`Amongst the finest younger English-language poets in the international
literary scene. A distinct voice: carefully modulated and skilled, well
measured and crafted.'
gregor
robertson on
BBC Radio
`Sen's uncannily easy control of rhythm and syntax is such that bare
narratives achieves poetic form and resonance ... deft use of half-rhyme
... darts and floats between free and formal verse ... a very fine poet
indeed ... At 29, he is probably as good as Louis MacNeice was at that
age, and he often reminds me of `the drunkenness of things being various'.'
angus calder in
The Scotsman
`Sen is not afraid to experiment with new and traditional forms and
subjects for poetry ... (His) poems display a fine eye for detail and
a deft use of images.'
Poetry
Review
`Like Vikram Seth, Sudeep Sen has been meteoric in his impact as a young
Indian poet writing in English.... Sen writes in his own unmistakable
voice .... startling images .... 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.'
mario relich in
World Literature
Today
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