Parasitic Oscillations

Parasitic Oscillations, a collection of innovative poems and images by the poet, memoirist, and professor of ecology Madhur Anand, is situated “on the / cusp where art and science meet.” The poems, which range in form from intricate lyrics to assemblages of found material, are linked by a through line concerning the study of birds, specifically the birds of India (some of them extinct). Anand draws on family history and scientific research to elucidate the ways the history of naturalism is interwoven with the history of colonialism.

A section of found poems, each titled “Song,” includes the poet’s photographs of “specimens” of Indian birds, photos that we learn were “taken on August 14, 2017, precisely 70 years after India gained independence from British rule, at the Natural History Museum, Tring.” The photographs, embedded with QR codes that link to recordings of the birds’ songs, are captioned with British colonial naturalists’ descriptions of the birds. Listening to the birdsong while reading the descriptions and gazing at the images, some of which show Anand’s hands holding the birds’ bodies, I experienced the work as a performance that troubled my sense of time and context while posing questions about ecology, power, and migration. 

The book’s concerns come together in the voluminous final poem “Slow Dance,” a response to John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” While it matches Ashbery’s poem in form and length, Anand’s is inspired not by Parmigianino’s trompe l’oeil painting, but by a curious installation called “Slow Dance,” made of “Wonder Machines,” shadowboxes (available for $399.00) that create the illusion of their contents moving, almost dancing, in slow motion. In this closing poem Anand hearkens back to the “Song” poems, describing her project in a way that gestures to the underlying force of the book: 

[…] I desired
not the specimens, but the arc of the narrative
which had brought me to the point of taking the photos
in the first place […]

Anand continues: “The arc itself was arched, / oscillatory, unstable and I wondered at / wonder.”