Sudeep Sen

Sen’s writing has been widely published in international journals and newspapers, including The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The Independent, The London Magazine, Poetry Review, Harvard Review and The Times of India, among others. His book, Postmarked India: New and Selected Poems, was awarded the Hawthornden Fellowship (UK) and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize (USA). He has been poet-in-residence at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh and a visiting scholar at Harvard University. Although prolific as a poet, a lesser known fact is Sen’s vigorous work as translator. He has translated several Bengali poets from Bangladesh (such as Aminur Rahman and Fazal Shahabuddin) into English. He is the editorial director of Aark Arts Books.

Sen’s poetry has received a fair measure of international attention. “Sen is an ambitious poet who doesn’t fight shy of large themes . . .,” says poet and critic Adil Jussawalla, while the late Indian poet Nissim Ezekiel commended his work for being “rich and complex without being obscure”. Gregor Robertson describes his as “a distinct voice: carefully modulated and skilled, well measured and crafted”.

Sen’s preoccupations with craft have been in evidence since his early work. His poetry has journeyed over the years between metrical verse and freer forms, between sonnets and ghazals, reaching for the cadences of the Sanskrit shloka and the Italian ottava rima. Thematically, the preoccupations have ranged from archetypal concerns of love and death to art and politics, from myth and history to what poet Kwame Dawes terms a “constant uneasiness with the legacy of art”.

The poems in this selection offer an interesting glimpse of Sen’s poetry over the years. There is a glimpse of biting understatement and formal economy in ‘Independent Homeland’ and ‘Glued’. There is the thick lyric yearning of his poem, ‘Offering’, where perspiration, passion and poetry – ‘stickiness’, ‘juice’ and ‘memory’ – fuse into a melodic mix.

My personal favourites, however, are the lesser known dramatic monologues from the chapbook, Bodytext. As it maps the flawed and miraculous geography of the human body – its dead bones and its wish-bones, its heat and its water, its brittle dreams and its unrelenting pain, its arthritis and its arias – the text lurches between the long sentence and abruptly fractured phrase, between measured reflection and jagged song. The tangibility of death – evoked in images of mineral and water, electricity and music – turns ‘Heavy Water’ and the other poems from this chapbook into a brooding essay on the body’s finiteness, a memorable prosody of pain.

Selected Bibliography

Poetry

Prose
Postcards from Bangladesh, with Tanvir Fattah and Kelley Lynch), University Press Limited, Dhaka, 2002

As editor/translator