Red

Informed by a sculptural residency in South Africa’s Cradle of Humankind, Red braids landscape, poetry, and politics of color.

Red is the second of Sudeep’s projected three volumes of EcoPoetry ­­— on the themes of the environment, ecology, and the climate crisis ­­— high quality poems with high quality art photographs.
So Red is a multi-genre book, rich in both colour tones and inventive framing. Each aspect complements the others in oblique ways without being merely illustrative. The wonderful tension between words and images sets up an immersive dialogue. The ‘image’ is central — both textual and visual, centripetal and centrifugal.
Extending and building upon Anthropocene, Sen’s first volume of EcoPoetry, Red pushes the debate wider and deeper.
Red starts in South Africa, in the socio-paleolithic highveld land­scape of the ‘Cradle of Humankind’. This UNESCO World Heritage Site, which occupies 180 square miles, contains a complex system of limestone caves, believed to be home to the largest concentration of human ancestral remains anywhere in the world. Specifically, Red focuses on the landscape at Nirox Sculpture Park and its environs — simultaneously wild and tamed.
Red is equally about India and about the rest of the world — about borderless lands, skies and oceans that connect us. Red is about the secrets of dolomite and “my intimate skies”, about the community of artists (present and absent) engaging through intricate works of ekphrasis. Red is about the politics of colour, language, body — about the complex neural transmissions that link each cell and sub-cell.
Red is intellectually stringent, tightly wrought, amniotic, visceral, raw.
Yet Red is also poised, subtle, choral, and always elegantly crafted — a tour de force.

Translated into 25 languages, Sudeep Sen’s own works include Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems, Fractals: New & Selected Poems (Global Literary Festival Award for 'Literary Excellence & Best Book of the Year' 2017; Rabindranath Tagore Literature Prize shortlist 2020); Rain ('Best Books of the Year', The Statesman), Aria (A. K. Ramanujan Translation Award 2009, 'Best Books of the Year', Outlook magazine), and Kaifi Azmi: Poems | Nazms (Bloomsbury 2019). Influential anthologies Editor him include The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry, World English Poetry, and Modern English Poetry by Younger Indians, and his work has appeared in TLS, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Observer, and The Telegraph, and Newsweek, and been broadcast on the BBC, PBS, CNN, IBN, NDTV, All India Radio and Doordarshan.Sen is the only Asian who has been honoured by being asked to deliver the Derek Walcott Lecture and to read at the Nobel Laureate Festival (in 2013). www.sudeepsen.org