Wednesday, April 06, 2022

Madhur Anand, Parasitic Oscillations

  

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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