Distilled, Delicate, and Definitive

I like big books and I cannot lie. Consider this: 384 pages, over 300 poems, a Randall Jarell poet struck by lightning five or six times or maybe more, torrential Béla Tarr rain and Glenfiddich on the rocks! Fractals is all this and more, exponentially more. Reading Sudeep Sen’s Fractals is like entering a recursive rabbit hole of rain and petrichor in a world replete with gouache shades and madness—the Matisse cut-out variety. It is an exploration of his virtuosity, a curious blend of language, rhythm, syntax, salmon and the smoky flavour of “Single Malt.”

Fractals is an encounter with a design paradigm, a certain matryoshka revelation of dolls-within-dolls. The book is tastefully divided into three sections: “New Poems,” “Selected Earlier Poems” and “Selected Translations” that are further subdivided in multiple sections—each title heightening the iteration, stylishly corralling into “The Droste effect.”

The first thing that strikes you is the luminosity of the book, and I am not talking about the grass & vanilla mustiness but, an antiquarian eye for detail. Let me go all Susan Sontag on you. I suddenly see everything in quotation marks. “Cut-and-paste.” Sample the poem “Blue Nude II,” a sonnet quoted below in full, where Sudeep deftly weaves in Matisse’s technique of “painting with scissors”:

Gently she has shifted her allotted spacethis time, and with itthe supine arch of her grace,the soft-posture tempering her inter-locking

limbs and body, the sun, and the artitself. But this sun’s apogeehas disappeared, unlighting the partspreviously lit by passion’s heat.

It’s burnt ends, now slowly gatheringpace. Up-close, she looks flushed when   kissed,but from afar, her changingmood is too subtle and hardly noticed.

The cut-and-paste may alter its clarity,but never her skin’s bare purity.

If Fractals is indeed a woman, then how should we read her? Let us look at her with an aesthete’s eye—the architecture, the art of the lapidary typography and structure. Flaubert said that poetry is as exact a science as geometry. Sudeep bisects his poem “Suspended Particles” in two equal parts on the page, each word airborne like dust.

Two shafts        A lost bee    of sunlight         drones inbisect                through    this room—          the window

His prose poem “Odissi” combines the laterite felicity of temple art with sculptural finesse. Words are impeccably laid in ashlar masonry where petals, incense, anklets fuse together and emerge as one body:

Architectural love and body love are one for me.Stone and flesh are one.

The poem “Dali’s Pâte de Verre” is significant, not only because it brings innovative glassmaking and the Art Nouveau movement to life in words, or its reference to Freud, or the angst of the subconscious—I love it because each stanza reminds me of about the enigma of a photograph.

it’s missing shape like an absent mannequinmimics 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 rescued and revealed simultaneously by light. Absence suddenly becomes a visual image, a missing shape, a ghost mannequin.

As gravity pulls down metal silicatesto gather in a clayey-bronze lump—orange changes to greento brown to black—its shine and shape

hiding their crystal impulse.

The second stanza is almost antithetical because it is laced with a stillness—a stillness that anticipates motion, like an indecisive Saul Leiter moment: the frame, vertical; the colour, chromatic. Colours unfurl magically like broken bangle pieces in a kaleidoscope; orange changing to green, to brown to black.

Many poems in Fractals have the opulence and the magnitude of a Candida Höfer image. Sample these lines from the poem “Electric Text” that give the readers a glimpse of Ulysses (1922) on the Liffey:

Extracting every photon of its...