The turn, the names, the
marsh, the charge, the cells, and Gandhi
march on. Shall it be
restored? My mother will die soon.
Last time she fell they
spent weeks adding salt to her blood.
It is dripping from the roofs
of castles, from IVs.
It is going where it is
needed most. A.O. Hume
made a customs line from
a hedge. I am reading it
Now as the biergarten
empties down the street. There is
a tax so large it becomes
a cavern. We ride through
On a boat at a rate
precipitated by stone.
The water there is the
purest. I can taste it with
one finger. The German
word for sea is meer and more
is mehr. Residue,
residual, knowing difference. (“SATYAGRAHA IN TÜBINGEN”)
The
second trade poetry collection and third book by
Guelph, Ontario writer Madhur Anand, following the poetry debut
A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes
(Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2015) and the Governor General’s
Award-winning experimental memoir,
This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart
(McClelland and Stewart, 2020), is
Parasitic Oscillations (McClelland
and Stewart, 2022). There are echoes of structure and concern throughout the
spring 2022 quartet of McClelland and Stewart poetry titles, from the
ecological drift through colonial land and colonial time of
Laurie D. Graham’s
simultaneously-published Fast Commute [
see my review of such here] and
Phoebe Wang’s Waking Occupations, and the ecological birdsong of
Tolu Oloruntoba’s Each One A
Furnace. Anand offers the beauty of birdsong and ecological concern among
and through a veil of scientific inquiry, shades of family detail and poetic
language. “Human speech is a subsong of trachea / and beak.” she writes, as
part of the short poem “A SIMPLE NOTE.” “It is illustrated in this letter how
// pressure will control not only strength but also sound. / It is expected
there be some overlap, tension // while mimicking lexicon, emphasis on power.”
Writing a collage of image, sound, research and speech, hers is a book of
counterpoints, compassions and compressions, moving between and amid terminologies
and alternate viewpoints, museum pieces and historical artifacts. “Every line
of thought / is an oscillation we must enter / into arbitrarily,” she writes, to
open the poem “MIND COMPRESSION,” “Only this small amount / of work in a vacuum
/ and it all makes sense // We are bound to equating / contradictions of
experience / with experience [.]” Structured in seven sections,
Parasitic
Oscillations offers a layering of inquiry, seeking to wrap her mind around
the world. She writes the bodies of birds and of human response, writing her
mother and her father and herself, through memory and Partition and of her own
three children; how the mind moves, and the body reacts, and back again. Anand
writes of poetic and scientific inquiry as two sides of the same coin, and how
her mind landed on that particular path, such as through the ninth part of the
twelve-poem sequence “PARAMETRIC OSCILLATION,” a poem that makes up the whole
of part five of the seven part collection:
Truth is, I stole Father’s
copy of Notes to Myself
without thinking. Wanting
it all, the lie in itself.
His dog ears were my ethics
tests: It is not always
necessary to think words. Thinking and
wanting: two
poplar leaves, one real, one
shadowed, on the cover
and subtitled My
Struggle to Become a Person.
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