Joseph John writes in World Literature Today: 'Mount Vesuvius in Eight Frames is a slim volume containing eight poems by Sudeep Sen and eight etchings by Peter Standen. The poems are meditations on the aftermath of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, which destroyed the Italian city of Pompeii, and the etchings provide pictorial representations of the love-death nexus on which these meditations focus. Together the poems and the etchings evoke an ironic vision of the perennial "macabreness" of the Vesuvian catastrophe. Between them they conjure up an intriguing "idyll" of unlamented mortality, with neither solemnity nor sentimentality attending on the singular phenomenon of death dreaming of life.