Lines that sing and sting

The poems in CP Surendran's new collection, Window With a Train Attached, attempt to communicate the inexpressibility and the essence of human existence

- Sudeep Sen

Window With a Train Attached C P Surendran 152pp, ₹499 Speaking Tiger

The poems in CP Surendran's Window With a Train Attached, are compact forms of a certain lyrical energy. Lines that sing and sting, lines that attempt to communicate the inexpressibility and the essence of our existence.

The book contains 90-odd new poems, and a dozen representing his earlier body of work spanning nearly four decades. The new ones, especially, the "quatrains", are a study in the craft of compression:

Below the years, behind your eyes, at the bottom of the clock A whole hill ticks away in a rose. We see it, but cannot feel Its razor breath in our face. The evening sows gold, Reaps coal. They burn our names, we travel slowly into rook.

- What Was

On the face of it, this is a poem about love, of innocence of feeling; but it is also about time, and the ephemeral nature of existence - They burn our names - and the lovers return to the apathetic stability of stone and dust. There is violence in Surendran's poems, directed mostly at himself, as in the ironised Opera:

The knife in your hand, snug like a blade deep in the breast / Of a lover who strayed, by steely means, arrives at its end. / Wearing red, looking like a storm, singing against your intent, / Carve me from throat to groin. Where you stop, there you rest.

While most poems in Window With a Train Attached are tightly wrought and on the shorter side, there are two unusually long poems, that justify their length by inherent cadence and dramatic tension: The Day After and I Am Nearly Not Here. Both run the risk of being interpreted as tantalisingly autobiographical.