Slow Dance in Deep Time
Review of Madhur Anand, Parasitic Oscillations
by Jackson Pinkowski
Madhur Anand’s second and latest collection of poetry, Parasitic Oscillations, is a work that challenges any unified notion of poetic convention. On first glance, readers may be surprised to find diagrams of ordinary differential equations alongside photographs of taxidermized birds; those averse to scientific jargon may gulp at the collection’s title alone. However, as one starts to read Anand’s work, what one finds is poetry that is not only demanding but readable. The collection’s greatest virtue is its subversion of generic expectation. Divided neatly into seven parts, Parasitic Oscillationsopens with an investigation into the scientific form of birdsong and then unravels into a polyphonic musing on the historical and the natural, the lost and the found, the personal and most importantly the poetic. It diverges from what one has come to anticipate in ecopoetry and confessional poetry.
The words of this book have a curious semblance of double-speak; the poet crafts lines loaded with multiple meanings that ask readers to conduct their own research. In turn, one is sent on a quest for meaning for rich diction like “Matlab,” “syrinx,” and “bifurcation.” The collection’s title itself questions one’s assumed knowledge of words and how they change with a shift of context. What exactly is the “parasitic,” what is “oscillation,” and are they different in poetry and in science? The fraught significance of words is a live issue throughout, especially where the speaker admits to almost writing “feather” instead of “father” or “sing” in place of “sign.”
Anand’s collection weaves together eclectic Canadiana, whisking the reader from London, Ontario, and its Storybook Gardens (“Animal Behaviour”), to Montreal and its perennially futuristic biosphere (“Parametric Oscillation”), along the way collecting “dime sailboats and quartered caribou.” Although Anand’s familiar image of a child learning about currency in “Summations” is both charming and recognizable to a Canadian audience, the poet never misses the opportunity to subvert and surprise: “Learning how to make change / is one of the hardest things we will tackle this year.” Whether it is the language of the classroom or the laboratory, Anand transforms the unassuming into the striking, not least through brilliant wordplay.
In the collection’s sixth part, made up of passages pulled from A.O. Hume’s The Nest and Eggs of Indian Birds,Anand harnesses the latent poetic potential of found documents. Where another poet would surgically splice a primary text into a poem, Anand transplants it whole, letting full passages stand in their own right. This bold decision gives Hume’s document a living quality that only further underscores the larger arc of Parasitic Oscillations. The reader is forced to understand the destruction caused in the name of scientific progress and the destruction caused in the name of imperial progress.
The collection reaches its height in its last and longest poem, “Slow Dance.” Markedly influenced by John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” (both poems adhere to the same number of lines and stanzas), “Slow Dance” serves as a refined culmination of Anand’s unique poetic voice and mission. This is especially true when it comes to the convergence of the scientific and poetic traditions. An empirical fact within the realm of science becomes equally true in the world of poetry: “It is very difficult to accept / bistability even after physicists / find it everywhere: the brain, the heart, the riverbed.” Though one might not understand the concept of bistability in physics, it is intuited with Anand’s guidance. For all its enigmatic abstractions and dual meanings, “Slow Dance” is most potent where it is tersest: “The birds in my head are now in yours.” Stripping back scientific language, Anand captures the ineffable and mystical power of poetry.
Any poet’s claim to have once and for all bridged the disciplines of science and art must be met with a healthy dose of skepticism. However, should they therefore be totally separated? One feels in Madhur Anand’s Parasitic Oscillation the deep unity that precedes classification and specialization. The poet asserts connections that have always existed; songs and nightmares can be mapped onto mathematical systems, just as poetry can be the structure by which one understands the spread of a pandemic, the building of a geodesic dome, or the conversational inflections of birdsong. Although science and poetry may routinely be characterized as opposing forces, Anand has revealed the flaws of any simplistic duality. What can be said for certain is that the trill of birdsong rings more strangely and beautifully after a reading of Madhur Anand’s Parasitic Oscillations.
Works Cited
Anand, Madhur. Parasitic Oscillations. McClelland & Stewart, 2022.
Jackson Pinkowski was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario. He is completing his joint honours degree in English literature and Russian studies at McGill University.
17 January 2025