course of a few weeks, Sen played around on his terrace and captured the sunset on his camera, attempting to evoke his reaction to the changing of the hours with some short lines of poetry. It is not necessary to stare at the same image Sen has taken to be evoked by his words. Under the dazzles of a departing sun, Sen notices ‘the rays glare / splits open their perfect coronas — pollen shower-burst, an ochre-flare,’ giving the sensibility of not only a sunset, but of particles thrashing against the earth, milliseconds of matter parting to compound and erupt at the throw of his thoughts. Conversely, underneath a flock of concavely blue clouds, Sen writes, ‘blue-grey will moult into salt-and-pepper ash-grey to silver-white, then to aged-white.’ To call “salt-and-pepper” a color creates the sense of spices dashing into the air, and then as we reflect on “aged-white,” we assume a milder image, something almost like fermenting cheese. Sen aligns the flavors of food with the sights of nature, and causes us as a result to view images in a completely new way. There are the poems of travel, subtitled under “Holocene: Geographies,” and then the ultimate compilation of reprieve and redemption, “Consolation: Hope.” After cycling through the world, not only through the places that have impacted Sen, but the atmospheric conflicts and confrontations that have riddled his mind with concern, Sen concludes his tour on a poem reflecting on the death of George Floyd. At first, the poem “Knee Jerk” seems a little out of line with the rest of the collection, but offers a weight and gravitas of its own little world. Sen decries, “Your bigoted white knees may have the blunt shameless strength to wrestle me down — but not the gift of humanity, or an ounce of compassion to make life breathe again.”
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