Detail of the cover for Red. Designed by Sudeep Sen
In the golden age of Dutch painting, a master like Vermeer or Gerard Dou would often withhold a single work. This was the pronkstuk, the showpiece. It was not commissioned by a patron, nor intended for the wall of a rich Dutch merchant. It remained in the artist’s studio, a testament to his consummate skill. Prospective buyers and curious visitors would be invited in, and, in the controlled light of the atelier, they would witness the full extent of the painter’s craft. They would marvel at the luminosity cast by silk, the impossible softness of skin and the magical gleam of polished silver emerging unexpectedly from the canvas. But they would also be asked to look deeper, to read hidden messages woven in. A distorted shape in the foreground would, from a certain angle, became a memento mori, a skull. The use of perspective manipulated the eye, and the light would fall exactly as the artist intended, seducing the eye.
It is in this tradition that we must approach Sudeep Sen’s Red. This is not merely a poem; it is a pronkstuk. It is a work of deliberate, virtuosity, held back from the easy commerce of casual reading to demonstrate the mastery of its creator. Sen is acutely aware of this. From the very first line, we are in the presence of an artist displaying his command over his medium. The poem is his studio, and the colour red, in all its incarnations, is his pigment.
Like a fijnschilder, Sen works with a miniaturist’s precision. Each line is applied with the care of a fine brushstroke, building up layer after layer of meaning, texture and sound. We see the ‘silken clothes and skin’ of his craft in the lush, sensory imagery: the glistening of red vermilion in coconut oil, the ‘silk-sheen’ of skin that mutates to a raw rash, the ‘rubescent’ light of a fading dusk. The poem is a display of technique so complete it becomes a subject in itself.
But this beauty is not merely decorative. As with the hidden skull in a Dutch still life, the exquisite surfaces of Sen’s poem conceal complex, often unsettling depths. The red of nuptial joy is inextricably bound to the red of blood and sacrifice. The ancient, ‘ruddy’ rock of the Kalahari whispers of erased histories and a land’s troubled past. The speaker’s own afflicted skin is a ‘wrinkled terrain’, a map of mortality and discomfort. The light shifts, the perspective distorts, and the shape of the poem changes depending on where the reader stands. A celebration of passion reveals itself to be a meditation on decay; a catalogue of colour becomes an exploration of political and personal violence.
We are lucky. Sudeep Sen’s pronkstuk, Red, is for sale. The poem (and book) demands to be read with the same focused attention one would give to a choice painting by Vermeer in the National Gallery. Red is a work of artifice in the highest sense, aware of its own construction, confident and brimming with the knowledge that true art lies in the tension between surface beauty and hidden truths. In reading it, we are invited into Sen’s studio, to marvel at his skill, to decipher, and to be moved, manipulated and ultimately transfixed by the poem the poet has chosen to share with us.
Ars Notoria
RED
1
Red is palash, red is alta —
it is nuptial, it is birth.
Red is Kali, red is Durga —
it is Sappho, it is Andal.
Red is my vocation,
my Chandipaath, your Onam.
On your forehead — I apply
triad-streaks of white-ash,
red vermilion mingled
in coconut-oil, glistening.
Love passion death decay, you say.
Red is forever & every day.
2.
Blood is not red, it is vital —
it is sanguine, it is sad.
Red colours my blankness,
my void, my needs.
It is hyoid’s reflected hue —
of hymen, fertility, flame.
It is frigidity, it is coldness —
it is passion, it is deep heat.
Red is cerise, carmine —
it is raw, it is incarnadine.
Each shade, a subtext —
each layer, a mood.
Each line, an absence —
each texture, a canvas.
3.
In Kalahari, red is quartzite —
sometimes, even dolomite.
Red is a toucan’s fossil beak,
a clawed deranged head
on a decapitated pedestal —
a cleaved log, bleeding?
Red is a carved skull —
hypothalamus hollowed out,
its spinal apex, a perfect hole —
tunnel sucking everything in.
A vulva’s cocoon — where
passion and pain meet —
waiting for an elusive epiphany,
cosmic timelines away.
A balloon, a red meat slab
scored in white-fat striations.
I hear an evangelist’s axioms —
banal truths, provide solace.
Or is it an ordinary tomato
in shopping aisle’s ordinary?
4.
My body’s wrinkled terrain
mimics Savannah’s skin-tone,
silk-sheen mutating to rough,
Bengali-smooth to red rash,
micro-warts birthing itch —
its discomfort, unpalatable.
My hand-nails are my tools —
their tips, my enemy.
The more I try to appease
my skin, the more it cries.
I am high on this veld air —
happy and sad, in orbital
parentheses. My brain cells
spark high-voltage
current. Even long-necked
African vultures perched
on high apocalyptic pylons
cannot absorb or mollify
the electrical impulses — my
magnetic field is in disarray.
5.
During my morning walk,
I encounter a ‘red’ hyena —
it’s rare appearance,
a blessing, I am told.
I spot a balletic impala,
it stares at me, piercingly —
I look away, unblinking.
Zebras in pairs soothe me,
I can hide in their hide —
their stripes, my camouflage.
The neighbouring lions roar —
baritone coarse, hungry.
I sit on a ruddy ancient rock —
its jaggedness, the secret
of its wisdom. I discover
an arm-length cochineal
stone, its digits perfectly
intact, folded as if
in communion — an absent
congregation chanting
songs invoking the rains —
ancestral guttural music,
understood only by those
from the soil of this earth.
6.
Layer after layer,
sedimentation, unpacking.
Is this rock, a mere fossil,
whose story has been
deliberately erased from
this land’s troubled
history? Pristine land’s
un-pristine past, an
illusion, a paradise-mirage
on the dark horizon.
I look at the slow setting
sun, soon to disappear
prematurely — over tall,
wild-grassed,
undulating blue-black hills.
Midges sting me, breaking
my stupor in this panoramic
evening penumbra.
7.
From a distant city, I smell
moon-flower’s aroma,
its elegant tubular chrysalis —
sheer, papery, enigmatic.
Lighting strikes in spectacular
colours. Capricorn-rain
pelts down with incessant fury.
In extreme slow-motion,
my memory juggles —
as I remember Pluto’s
not-so-distant vanishing —
from my intimate skies.
8.
Red is defiance, red is molten —
red is joy, red is love.
Love is ferric, love is claret —
it is infra-red, it is invisible.
It is the colour of my ink —
the saree that wraps you,
the colour that is wordless —
the colour of my madness.
Red, my Banalata, my Radha,
my Maud Gonne, my Dol.
Red is an elongated shade
of healing, our love-song,
our alternating heartbeats —
a blue-bird’s yearning
for a red-beaked seagull.
Dawn morphs, dusk ruddy —
rufous reed, rubescent red —
I read red, our spectrum’s end.
9.
The air now has turned wet, cool —
the weather, pre-autumnal.
My tequila-sunset red ink,
soon replaces the fading violet.
My loyal indelible ruby-liquid,
mapped words without fail.
No full-stops, only ellipses.
My skin’s red rashes, tried to
impede its strokes — but didn’t
diminish its ardour. Everything
outside is orange, pink, red.
My blood — alive in red heat.
10.
Red is visceral, red is amniotic,
red is rebirth, red is de rigueur —
red is livid, red is political,
red is damask, red is vermeil.
With the power of poetry —
red will engulf, cauterise, torrefy.
With the power of poetry —
red will resuscitate, recreate,
exfoliate — alive, anew.
And then, there was fire ….
Sudeep Sen’s [www.sudeepsen.org] is widely recognised as a major new generation voice in world literature and ‘one of the finest English-language poets in the international literary scene’ (BBC Radio), ‘fascinated not just by language but the possibilities of language’ (Scotland on Sunday). He received a Pleiades Honour (at the Struga Poetry Festival, Macedonia) for having made “a significant contribution to contemporary world poetry”. His prize-winning books include: Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins), Rain, Aria (A. K. Ramanujan Translation Award), Fractals: New & Selected Poems | Translations 1980-2015 (London Magazine Editions), EroText (Vintage: Penguin Random House), Kaifi Azmi: Poems | Nazms (Bloomsbury), Anthropocene: Climate Change, Contagion, Consolation (Pippa Rann, 2021-22 Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize winner), and Red (Nirox Foundation, 2023). He has edited influential anthologies, including: The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry (editor), World English Poetry, Modern English Poetry by Younger Indians (Sahitya Akademi), and Converse: Contemporary English Poetry by Indians (Pippa Rann). Blue Nude: Ekphrasis & New Poems (Jorge Zalamea International Poetry Prize), and The Whispering Anklets are forthcoming. Sen’s works have been translated into over 25 languages. His words have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Newsweek, Guardian, Observer, Independent, Telegraph, Financial Times, Herald, Poetry Review, Literary Review, Harvard Review, Hindu, Hindustan Times, Times of India, Indian Express, Outlook, India Today, and broadcast on bbc, pbs, cnn ibn, ndtv, air & Doordarshan. Sen’s newer work appears in New Writing 15 (Granta), Language for a New Century (Norton), Leela: An Erotic Play of Verse and Art (Collins), Indian Love Poems (Knopf/Random House/Everyman), Out of Bounds (Bloodaxe), Initiate: Oxford New Writing (Blackwell), and Name me a Word (Yale). He is the editorial director of AARK ARTS, editor of Atlas, and recently on a fellowship as a writer-in-residence at the Nirox Foundation (South Africa). His professional photography is represented by ArtMbassy, Rome [http://www.artmbassy.com/artists.html]; and currently the inaugural artist-in-residence at the Museo Camera (India). The Government of India awarded him the senior fellowship for “outstanding persons in the field of culture/literature.” Sen is the first Asian honoured to deliver the Derek Walcott Lecture and read at the Nobel Laureate Festival.
Red by Sudeep Sen can be purchased at all good bookshops.
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