In A.S. Byatt's Frederica Potter quartet, the fictional Frederica writes a book called
Laminations containing "jottings, cut-ups, commonplaces and scraps of writing." The idea is that a real mind contains layer upon layer of distinct thoughts and observations. A conventional narrative or point of view distorts the portrait--the fragments are a better impression of the way thoughts actually appear.
Madhur Anand's second poetry collection,
Parasitic Oscillations, seems at first to be constructed on the
Laminations principle. The first section is composed of phase diagrams and found poems built from biology articles. For example, "A Simple Note" begins:
It is basically expected that time is a wave
and history the darker diagram of clockwise
arrows. Human speech is a subsong of trachea
and beak. It is illustrated in this letter how [...]
But a poetry collection teaches you how it wants to be read. The organizing metaphor of
Parasitic Oscillations is not separated laminations. There are cross-connections, interlinked references, lines repeated across poems to accentuate small changes. A better metaphor might be an attractor, in the mathematical sense--a state to which trajectories are drawn, despite their different starting points--or simply resonance.
One of the attractors is a specific fire. Here it is in "Partition 2":
When the Natural History Museum of Delhi
went up in flames, she remembered a plume, grey-pink-black
emitting from rooftops, a note at her mothers' feet
which reappeared at the Open Field Collective art
box displayed for the public. "I Thought You Were Solid..."
"Amplification" tends toward the same attractor:
Twenty years ago a young man
who claimed to be my soulmate
gave me The Art of Loving
the author of which claimed "love is a verb."
It's not. Neither is it an art.
Love can only be a noun, as in:
The wooden partitions to separate different wings
of the museum on each of the four floors fed the fire.
Another recurring motif is specimens of birds. The specimens are not devoid of feeling--they represent a multitude of emotions, not always compatible, not always evident. There's a fundamental tension here between the scientist's desire to stand apart from the thing they are observing and the knowledge (ecological, anticolonialist, personal) that there is no such place as apart. It may take a little while to recognize that this is also a collection about grief. In that sense, "On the Nature of Things" contains a manifesto:
Some say the best thing for bird safety,
heartbreak, and climate change is to think
they're the same thing. It's true.
When you think long enough of a sonation,
that last call you shouldn't have answered
with Scotch, dirty sheets, carbon footprints, a noted ji,
atmospheric emissions, there appear feathers.
There is, after all, no such place as apart.
(I read a review copy provided by the author.)
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