A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes
Poems
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A striking poetic debut that brilliantly illuminates and celebrates the intersection of poetry and science, and the ways they can mediate our discovery of the world and our place in it.
Originating from her living room, backyard garden, university office, or the field sites in boreal or tropical forests, the poems in Madhur Anand’s captivating debut collection compose a lyric science; they bring order and chaos together into a unified theory of predicting catastrophes, large and small. Anand’s ecologist poetics are sophisticated and original; her voice is an “index,” a way of cataloguing and measuring the world and human experience, and of illuminating the interconnectedness at the heart of all things. Narrating the beauty of her perceived world, the poems unabashedly embrace the scintillant language of scientific evidence as they interrogate crises of personal and global concern. The result is a poetry that is as complex as it is compassionate. Anand’s modernist intervention into “nature” poetry is a sparkling addition to poetics in Canada and beyond.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Anand's exquisitely crafted debut poetry collection combines scientific, observational, socially conscious, haunting and reflexively personal, and almost Romantic strains into a cohesive, captivating whole. The publisher's descriptions of her work as "ecologist poetics" and her index as "a way of cataloguing and measuring the world and human experience" are entirely apt for this collection's seemingly effortless, deeply humanist sleight of hand. Through four sections of intricately constructed overarching narrative, Anand's attention to and ability to evoke explicit, exponential beauty in scientific and natural form are simply stunning. Evocations are most keenly felt in "Cosmos Bipinnatus" and "Held in a Fist," but are scattered throughout the whole. Indeed, from the volume's opening quiescences and meditations, deeply personal yet ghostlike, in "Somewhere, a Lake," to its cultural and familial recollections in "Two Jars," to its marriage of personal and scientific and logical forms in "Conditional B," to the perfect, closing encapsulation of theory and personal notes in the final lines of "Too Exhaustive to Survey Here," Anand's debut is in every measure a triumph.
