Lesley Sharpe considers acts of recalibration in Sensitive to Temperature by Serena Alagappan. This review was first published in The Alchemy Spoon 11, November 2023 .
Serena Alagappan, Sensitive to Temperature (New Poets Prize),
The Poetry Business (2023), £6
Serena Alagappan’s first pamphlet, Sensitive to Temperature, feels into the personal and wider implications of change, with temperature as barometer for everything that shifts beyond the poet’s control. Positioning the close detail of individual lives within the wider scope of an inscrutable universe, Alagappan touches into the movements of both ecosystems and planetary orbits, their influence ‘as certain as the globe/ warming, fake medicine, false starts, real healing’ (‘Clockwork’).
This contradictory sense of proximity and distance energises Alagappan’s poems, as in ‘Let’s Catch Up Soon’, which attempts to ‘ventriloquize/ that leaf, or the veins bulging/ inside it’, while opening a broader metaphor:
Waiting for fruits to soften
is waiting for a friend
with whom it’s been a long
time since you’ve spoken.
A sensitivity to time as well as temperature is evident, where perception animates ‘indiscernibly small and precise recalibrations’ (‘Clockwork’):
We blink and the world rearranges.
We blink and it remains unchanged.
In addition to the tiny shifts of behaviour in which the slightest adjustment of temperature implies a radical recalibration of experience – temperature as mood, as health, as intimate participant in the process that initiates decay – there are the movements of deep time, planets, the formation of rivers. Spare, encyclopaedic in tone,
One orbit, which lasts 405,000 years,
helps geologists measure planetary
dynamics
while elsewhere, Alagappan’s explorations with poetic form shape the fluid structure of ‘The Beginning of the Thames’, which weaves its way across the page to create a small river of space:
if a river can begin this clear, then low
hours can climb their way out new mouths.
Amidst the languid tone is a characteristic compression of imagery, where a
Seaweed storm
below surface glass permits a green reflection green, as in
newly alive, chlorophyll- innocence.
This sense of the pristine, pitted against immanent loss, appears in ‘Aurora’, where ‘ignorance is both a blessing and a curse’, and the poet reveals that
Everything became
slippery confusing after the first
In this way, questions of perspective and scale lie at the heart of the sequence, its title poem ‘Sensitive to Temperature’ imagining icicles on a satellite of Jupiter, whose
frigid mountain vanes are just a few hundred million miles
away. They live close too: in me and you, sensitive to temperature,
frozen in numb rapture.
With all distance undercut by the simple word ‘just’, that ‘numb rapture’ might explode its potential. Again, Alagappan yokes unexpected images in ‘How Dark the Beginning’, as the poet realises ‘My tee-shirt mapped a constellation of stars’. In ‘Red Moon’, another closeness prevents perception: ‘your hand was not only /too close to see, but also preventing your sight’. Powerful compressions attempt to resolve contradiction: ‘there is not one heart for love and/ one for hatred. There is only one heart for both.’
Moments of crisis balance acts of regeneration, sometimes strange and unsettling, as in ‘After the Mushroom at the End of the World’, a poem whose scale is simultaneously monumental and minute to picture ‘how after nuclear disaster/ mushrooms grow on reactor walls’. Imitating the life-giving process by ‘harnessing radiation like purple/ alliums photosynthesize light’, they are even, the poet concludes, ‘sucking energy from decay’ in vampiric acts of self-renewal.
How far might these poetic acts of recognition become aesthetic remedies, as urgent as the opening poem ‘slipface’, whose sensitivities seem time-critical, and the poet asks, ‘has the moment passed?’ In the sparks of fire ‘aestheticized, / anthropomorphised’ as ‘giddy stars’ in ‘Forest Fire from Far Away’, the poet makes explicit an anthropomorphism which projects everything in its own image, chief destroyer cast also as chief creator, to ask what the earth, with its ‘bloodshot sea’, will ‘bear/ for this brutality?’ Similarly, in ‘The Sky Has a Body’, the sickness of the natural world is humanised to engage our attention: ‘The sky runs a fever’, and ‘wheezes with its wind’, till finally, impossible to ignore, it ‘weeps from every pore’.
Amidst this uncertainty, the poet dives deep to unearth, in acts of anaphora, a redeeming sense of the sacred, declaring
Holy the indigo aura
that casts doubt on a landscape’s
verity. Fog or foam, snow caps or sea?
Ambiguity and destruction even contain the holistic elements of rebirth, when aligned with deeper cycles of time:
Holy the volcano, and
the ones spared
from the volcano,
and the volcano’s fertile sand.
These are poems of beginnings and endings, and of the strange middle ground between. Alagappan’s enquiry investigates this territory in accomplished poems that prove, as the poet writes in ‘Clockwork’, that ‘everything we can see can shrink/ or magnify, meaning, sight is plastic’. Memory and imagination also become tools of navigation, distinctively human attributes which are elusive, but essential, to meet and anticipate change on whatever scale, for ‘the past you can’t remember is the future you can’t imagine’ (‘The Body Keeps the Score’).