Sudeep Sen
Sudeep Sen is a poet, translator, editor and artist. He lives in New Delhi
and London. His award-winning books include: Postmarked India: New &
Selected Poems (HarperCollins), Distracted Geographies, Prayer
Flag and, most recently, Rain. He was written for the Times
Literary Supplement, Guardian, Independent, Ovserver, Herald, Financial
Times, London Magazine, Literary Review and BBC, and was a visiting
scholar at Harvard University.
He is the editor of ATLAS a new international literary
Magazine, launched in June 2006.
For this e-mail workshop, Sudeep will be helping us turn
Great Britain's National Poetry Day into International Poetry Day with our
inter-continental e-mail workshop. Sudeep will be on-line in New Delhi, sharing
the workshop with the Purple Poets' Writer-in-Residence Kim Morrissey in
London.
Sudeep Sen
"PRAYER FLAG"
Om, Mani Padme Hum
O, the Jewel in the Lotus
-- inscription on a Tibetan prayer flag
1. MANAS SAROVAR, MT. KKAILASH
Frayed, flapping in the high winds --
prayer flags unravel --
homage to the day's first light.
But today, the dawn is not as bright,
though heavy, brooding, silver-grey
like the lake's shimmering glass-top.
No one is here, except for a woman
staring far away,
wrapped in her sanctity
of continuous linen -- her own sari
like a prayer flag --
though devoid of any colour.
She isn't mourning or crying,
just gazing fixedly
into the water's changing glimmer.
as the sky's wet weight
and the shore's rocky line meet,
their edges meanderingly
melting into the lake itself.
I stood far behind her,
behind everything she saw.
PRAYER FLAG
cd available from peepaltreepress
17 King's Avenue, Leeds LS6 1QS, United Kingdom
PRAISE FOR SUDEEP SEN:
'Sen [has] extended the range of Indian verse in English
to encompass a variety of alternative views of language,
history and culture'.
-- Pears Cyclopaedia 2003 (Penguin)
'Sen is an eclectic poet whose understated work eschews fashionable trends,
while exhibiting considerable technical virtuosity and versatility'.
-- JOHN THIEME in Cambridge Guide to Literature in English
[Cambridge University Press]
'Sudeep Sen's poems are a present which bring - like all true poetry - so
much companionship'.
--JOHN BERGER, The Ways of Seeing (Penguin & BBC)
WEBSITES FEATURING SUDEEP SEN'S WORK:
Sudeep Sen
(work, biography and complete bibliography):
http://www.sudeepsen.net/
Hypertext Poetry Workshop
(London, England) Site:
http://www.btinternet.com/~carpenter/home1.htm
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