Of Distracted Geologies
Akshaya Kumar
ANTHROPOCENE: CLIMATE CHANGE, CONTAGION, CONSOLATION by Sudeep Sen Pippa Rann Books & Media, UK, 2021, 184 pp., 599.00
April 2022, volume 46, No 4

With the arrival of his new collection, Anthropocene, a multi-genre book of poetry, literary prose and photography—Sudeep Sen takes a vertical plunge into deep history. From being a poet of Distracted Geographies, he now ventures to be a poet of distracted geologies and its sedimented pasts. If in his earlier major collection Fractals, he could be seen traversing across ravaged war zones from Kargil to Gaza to trace remnants of life—in this latest book, the entire planet with its disoriented seas, skies, seasons and sites, becomes his theatre of concern. Instead of poeticizing life on an island, he is now worried about the very life of the sinking island itself. Ironically, it is the extended ‘uneasy/solitude’ of quarantined existence that catapults him into a poet of evolutionary planetarity.

In her compelling Foreword to the collection, the leading American poet/activist Carolyn Forché, very audaciously, calls the collection ‘a 21st century epic’ which is at once ‘personal, historical and immediate’. Sudeep Sen packs so much poetic solemnity into this 184-page volume that cumulatively the collection turns out to be a complete experience.

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