Life in Verse | Book Review — Anthropocene: Climate Change, Contagion, Consolation by Sudeep Sen

A file photograph of rescue work underway at Tapovan in Chamoli after a glacier broke off, inflicting large flooding in Uttarakhand in February this yr (Categorical photograph)

By Suvanshkriti Singh

For many of us, the final yr and 1 / 4 has been a merciless and weird impediment race. Time warped, fearful days sank into hideous nights. With tragedy hurtling after disaster, there has scarcely been a second to survey the shapes into which our scars have sculpted us.

It’s exactly these imprints that Sudeep Sen units out to delineate in his multi-genre assortment Anthropocene: Local weather Change, Contagion, Comfort. Right here, then, is a report of the cataclysms by way of which we now have lived, liked and misplaced, as a lot an train in catharsis as it’s in memorialising.

Though they’re organised into discrete sections within the e-book, the pandemic, in Sen’s paradigm, is simply a symptom of the bigger local weather disaster. The language of his verses seamlessly transforms the “asthmatic sounds” of “lungs fuelled by Delhi’s insidious poisonous air into the “wheeze whistles” of viral pneumonia. Related, too, he claims, is the emotional and visceral expertise of the environmental and well being crises:

At almost 50°C, you don’t want a
pandemic to remind you of human
agony and grief — you inhabit one

The entanglement deepens. Sounds and pictures turn out to be entire phenomena of climatic violence replicated within the microcosm of errant physiology. In Implosion, ribcages battle to comprise cyclonic storms; in Icicles, the extremes of climate are reproduced in human anatomy as “bones which might be parched in warmth, flip to/skeletal icicles”; summer time warmth competes for devastating potential with an inner burning in Fever Pitch.

Sen’s insistence on the shut linkage between the pandemic and the local weather disaster serves to spotlight the precarity of the environmental situations that maintain life. The vocabulary of hazard proliferates the gathering, with solitary clouds “wafting perilously”, and “tree leaf-ridges struggl[ing] to provide life”. You might, maybe, argue in regards to the strategic worth of using the language of existential risk to altering our collective local weather consciousness, however the deep emotionality underlying Sen’s assertion of the very fact of impending doom compels empathy. There are the acquainted suspects — despair, resignation, warning, opprobrium — because the poet speaks of floods, droughts, and pestilence of the long run. Nonetheless, there may be additionally nostalgic love — for “[t]he lighthouse/ our beacon/ an journey island”, the rituals of spring, and an ode-like consideration to mundane element that might make Rilke proud.

In type and type, the gathering accommodates a pleasant vary. The visible orientation of the conceptually spacious, quick traces of Amaltas imitate the tree’s supple fall in form even because the verses seize the horrible, stunning, yellow warmth of a Delhi summer time. In Bathe, Wake, the traces stretch horizontally, the phrases falling in sheets of prose poetry, “with…the complete fury of an unstoppered monsoon”. If Indian Skies is a cinquain, Paper T[r]ails and Disembodied 2: Les Voyageurs are among the many most explicitly exquisitely ekphrastic. Most of Sen’s poems are quick, sharp, and decided, however the incisiveness of his Corona Haiku is deadly. The 20 haiku that represent the cluster are among the many most politically responsive of verses, taking up the Indian state’s contemptuous response to the plight of migrant labourers, its failure in getting ready applicable medical infrastructure, and the appalling flippancy of the likes of Donald Trump.

What unites these various verses is their imagistic high quality. His potential to weave sound into sight, create color from scent is certainly one of Sen’s most admirable abilities, second solely to his potential to tailor phrases into camera-sharp photos. Hearken to the Stars transforms the night time sky into “[a]n aural orchestra…echoing anti-gravity static, /space-dust murmurations, galactic-sighs”.

Anthropocene is just not with out its share of trite pictures and theses, however even these are delivered with distinctive ability. What needs to be unimaginable turns into, in Sen’s hand, seen in high-definition: “On an empty chair, sits a bodyless type — legs/ crossed, no backbone, a jacket held on the chair’s/ body”. Or, pattern the swooping gaze that provides us this description of Varanasi’s ghats:

Presiding monks, feed ritual ghee
to the burning wood-and-dead —
the flames forming big flares,
fragmented waves of golden-amber spark,
electrifying helical fire-flurries —

Along with this poetic selection, Sen offers us diaristic literary criticism, flash fiction, a number of images, and a poetic travelogue. The pictures, significantly, are an interesting complement to Sen’s many ekphrastic poems within the assortment. Taken over the lockdown interval at totally different instances of the day from the identical spot, and captioned by his personal lyrics, the greys, blues, pinks, and oranges, and yellows of the snapshots appear to carry life itself inside them. This simple, border-free entry even because the vantage level and the topic are dominated by fertile, cherished solitude.

Sen confesses to discovering the concept of self-isolation amusing. He even chastises us, in Quarantine, to understand the slowdown that it presents. On this level, nonetheless, he appears conflicted, having already proven consciousness of the psychological well being epidemic that adopted the imposition of lockdowns. However, in Poetics of Solitude, Songs of Silence, the philosophic musings on aloneness appear to neglect fully the nice human intuition for sociality.

Sen seems considerably blind, additionally, to his upper-class, city privilege. A lot of the gathering’s titular comfort comes from artwork, some extra from journey. However, it’s only a small minority to whom the artwork he talks of is accessible. The internationalism works in Sen’s favour the place it permits him to cross literal and metaphorical borders, underscoring the cultural imprints of the human race. Nonetheless, the shortage of an acknowledgement of the luxuriousness of journey, the eager for it, made extra intense by its unaffordability — the presence of a void the place nuanced feelings ought to and might be — considerably lessens the enjoyment of simple artistry.

For all its flaws, nonetheless, Anthropocene makes an pressing and exquisite argument, one that can not be emphasised typically sufficient. It’s a e-book for the instances, if not absolutely for the soul.

Suvanshkriti Singh is a freelancer

Anthropocene: Local weather Change, Contagion, Comfort
Sudeep Sen
Pippa Rann Books & Media/Penguin Random Home
Pp 176, Rs 599