Sudeep Sen.

Sudeep Sen. Poems

It is mid-afternoon now,
the sun streaks slant wards
through the attic's double-glazing
melting the scorched ink
...

One moonlit December night
you came knocking at my door,
I took my time to open.
...

My syntax, tightly-wrought—
I struggle to let go,
to let go of its formality,
...

some things, I knew,
were beyond choosing:

didu—grandmother—wilting
under cancer’s terminus care.
...

A bright red boat
Yellow capsicums

Blue fishing nets
Ochre fort walls
...

Under the soft translucent linen,
the ridges around your nipples

harden at the thought of my tongue.
You — lying inverted like the letter ‘c’ —
...

You carelessly tossed
the jacket on a chair.
The assembly of cloth
collapsed in slow motion
...

Outside, “Allah-u-Akbar”
pierces the dawn air —
It is still dark.
...

9.

a languorous kiss —
the faintest smell of ocean —
salt-lipped breeze, pleading —
...

10.

As winter secrets
melt

with the purple
sun,
...

11.

Ten years on, I came searching for
war signs of the past
expecting remnants—magazine debris,
unexploded shells,
...

at 12,000 feet
slopes steeply. Hard snow
cut into two
by winding tarmac—
...

13.

In Japanese, Yuki is snow—
unmelted and poised.

She sits askance
in front of a wine-tinged door
...

14.

Birds fly across the pale blue sky
cross-stitching a matrix in Pali—

a tongue now beautifully classical
like temple-toned Bharatanatyam.
...

The heavy drunken aroma
of fresh guavas
is too sweet for me to bear.
...

the kindness of libation, lyric, and blood
her endless notes left for me —
little secrets, graces —
trills recorded on blue and purple parchment
...

Spaces in the electric air divide themselves
in circular rhythms, as the slender
grace of your arms and bell-tied ankles
describe a geometric topography, real, cosmic,
...

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
...

Sudeep Sen. Biography

Sudeep Sen is an Indian poet and editor living in London and New Delhi. Life and Work Sen studied at St Columba's School and read literature at Hindu College Delhi University. As an Inlaks Scholar, he received a master's degree from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York. Sen was an international poet-in-residence at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh, and a visiting scholar at Harvard University. His books include Postcards from Bangladesh, Prayer Flag, Distracted Geographies, and Rain. He has edited anthologies including: The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry by Indians (2011), World Literature Today Writing from Modern India (2010),The Literary Review Indian Poetry (2009) and Midnight's Grandchildren: Post-Independence English Poetry from India (2004). His work appears in anthologies such as Indian Love Poems (2005), New Writing 15 (2007), Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond (2008) and Initiate: An Anthology of New Oxford Writing (2010). Sen 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.[1] Sen's writings have appeared in newspapers, magazines, journals, and broadcast on radio and television. They include: the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The Independent, The Financial Times, Poetry Review, Literary Review and the Harvard Review. He has broadcast on BBC World (TV), BBC Radio, PBS, Radio Tehran and Radio Jerusalem. He has written, edited & translated over 30 books and chapbooks. Sen has received a Hawthornden Fellowship (UK) and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize (US) for poems included in Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins). He won an A. K. Ramanujan Translation Award. Sen has directed or co-directed several short films and documentaries, including Rhythm, White Shoe Story, Woman of a Thousand Fires, Babylon is Dying: Diary of Third Street (nominated for a student Emmy Award), and Flying Home. Sen is the member of The Plimpton Circle of The Paris Review, curator of the 'World Poetry Portfolio' series for Molossus, and serves on the editorial boards of The Literary Review, International Literary Quarterly, Orient Express and New Quest. In 2008 he was appointed director of the Delhi International Literary Festival. In 2010, he was the first foreign co-judge for the Arvon Foundation International Poetry Competition. He is the editorial director of Aark Arts publishers and editor of Atlas.)

The Best Poem Of Sudeep Sen.

Sun-Blanched Blood

(for Kwame)

1

It is mid-afternoon now,
the sun streaks slant wards
through the attic's double-glazing
melting the scorched ink
in my crowded note-book
that lies blanched
on the sparse weathered table.
Hardened sepia-stained lines
that once approximated to
a flock of metaphors,
now rearrange themselves
into a congregation of phrases,
a lineation of new line-breaks:
stops that defy
even the physics of refraction,
thoughts that now re-surface
and resurrect just as
passion and reverence did
within the folds of The Prophet.

2

It is still mid-afternoon,
the blue blaze makes the pages
of my book flip over gently
in the invisible wind of silence.
The heat penetrating the glass
focuses even more fiercely
smoking out redolent similes,
questioning the whole point,
the nib of writing itself.
Underneath the permanent scar
of jet-black fluid and heat
is pulp, half-dead.
Beneath the persistent hoarse-
drone of metal-scratching
is bleached pulp, half-alive,
its cotton laid sheets
carefully encoded with
the magic arc of a gold-tip.
Words appear, and more
words. And under them all,
I discover much later,
a small spring insect
that lay mummified,
quietly crushed below
the weight of words,
its innocence and juice
trapped under oppression
of ambition and intellect,
baptised and bloodied.

3

It is mid-afternoon,
and I too lie, dead-
still, blanched, bloodied.

Sudeep Sen. Comments

Sayeed Abubakar 09 July 2012

Hi poet, I am from Bangladesh. Congratulation.

2 3 Reply

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