Poems of CP Surendran window attached to the train, There are condensed forms of a certain lyrical energy. Lines that sing and sting, lines that try to communicate the indescribability and essence of our existence. There is a lightness of sight as the poet looks at the world, and the metaphors used are powerfully imaginative. The book contains over 90 new poems, and a dozen poems representing his earlier works spanning nearly four decades. But the new ones, in particular, the ‘quatrain’, are studies of the craft of compression:
Under the years, behind your eyes, under the clock, a whole hill ticks like roses. We see it, but cannot feel its strong breath on our faces. Evening sows gold and reaps coal. They burn our names, we travel slowly in the boat. – what was
At first glance, it is a poem about love, about the innocence of feeling; But it is also about the fleeting nature of time and existence – “They burn our names” – and the return of lovers to the melancholy stability of stone and dust.
Surendran’s poems contain violence, which mostly focuses on him. However, as stated satirically, he is overall more of a suitor than a murderer. Opera: : The knife in your hand, like a blade driven deep into the chest / Of a lover who has gone astray, in steely ways, reaches his end. / Dressed in red, looking like a storm, singing against my will, / Carving me from neck to waist. Wherever you stop, you will rest there.
While most poems train window are tightly crafted—and on the short side—are two unusually long poems, which justify their length by the underlying rhythm and dramatic tension: next day And I’m almost not here. Both run the risk of being interpreted as autobiographical.
Poem, next dayThat’s a good place to go for a deeper critic—where the poet is trying to bet everything on the hallucination of his experience, as it is supposed to be. “Pale dawn floating face up in a rain-ravaged river. / Behind the funeral home, the fat rats of the distant hills / are running to gnaw on the food left at night. /…Now that I’m gone, son, are you free? /Dead, yet I bless you.“Rain-wrecked” is a clever alliteration on ‘train-wrecked’, as we grapple with the difficulties and entanglements of life. This is perhaps the poet’s last train without any destination. On a surface level, this poem is about the life and death of a matriarch, her impact on the narrator, a psychological study of the relationship between a mother and son. It’s quite unbearable, the beauty and fleeting nature of it.
But is the poet’s work complete? Not at all – it’s just a invitation. This poem begins – “Quench the heart’s old, purple fire with wine, stay; / In the wild jasmine / See a lack growing white on the vines. Come in April when the house / is on fire.” Whether this is the cruellest month or not, it is only the beginning – a moment when the creative and mental fires burn – their flame set to live long and burn far. After all, in burning lies rejuvenation.
In I’m not nearly thereThe second long poem in the book – what is attempted is the almost unspeakable life story of the French Symbolist poet, Arthur Rimbaud, who ended his poetic career at the age of 20, and ended up as a coffee and gun trader in Africa, away from the inevitable festivals of the world. His life and exploits provide an objective-correlative to the narrating voice, perhaps to his life situation: For the cypress, the stone-digger, lifeless, hard / like the heart of a rake… / cool as a glass of undrank absinthe. / …empty like the sea / Empty on the shores of Eden, / Where the sands block the anabasis of undone kings: / …an attempt to escape without a trace / From the disease of naming things…
In general, the poems here have a strong sense of rhythm. Most of the ‘quatrains’ are old-fashioned rhyme, and sometimes even seem Shakespearean, perhaps to help the poet cut through his obsessive thoughts. Even in poems where no clear aural scheme is resorted to, the essential rhythm is assured. For example, these lines from a prose poem, returnThe theme of which is the narrator’s return to his roots: “The narrow road picks its way through puddles. The rain drops the sky at your feet. You are here, wadi as an unheard prayer.”
Through the poems, one realizes the process of a frightening, if unrelenting confrontation with oneself – representing our own unresolved saga of inner conflict, the truest war we can possibly fight. Consider duel where the narrator’s “enemy”, “It has risen again, knife in hand, / from the dust”, a place where “the bougainvillea mingles / with the sun flowers and leaves / like sherbet / she drinks the shade.”“The enemy, of course, is the narrator’s own shadow, the darker self that Carl Jung talks about.
In this poem, as in the rest, there appears to be Surendran’s effort – to pin down the hallucinatory quality of the experience with images. Perhaps because of this, his poetry often takes on a farewell quality, a separation informed by the wasa-bi of things – also exemplified in an optimistic poem, invitation: “Put out the heart’s old, purple fire with wine, wait; / See the white jasmine growing in the wild / A lackey breaking out on the vines. Come in April when you are home / On fire. Or in June when the lonely boy comes to the terrace / Flings rain down like crushed glass… / Come In fact, at any given moment, the moon here is pledged to silence…” The diction is almost monotonous – but always measured, set in the metered architecture of verse structure, punctuated and controlled by rhythm.
Interestingly, there are many animal poems. They want some kind of reinterpretation. endling It’s about a snail, the last of its kind: Thom Gunn asked, “What is the wrath of a snail? / It’s the little man doing battle with the tyranny of his limits / And, beaten, crawling back toward the sun.”
Other animals in which the poet expresses his ‘outsiderness’ include the snake (east of eden), Owl (“Once I paused, watching an owl swoop down…circling around the churchgoers, / carrying a mouse, its front legs joined in prayer, to Christ in heaven.”), moth (“Gathered from carbon, kimono sleeves / The length of your wings is a million years / … You are a vanished forest circling my lamp.“), and sharks.
The title of the tiger poem is funny, taiga. animal cries poem, howlFar from being a Ginzburgian sentence, it is a statement, an allusion to current social and political discourse – which is often – on a banal and unintentional level. Poet to groanHalf asleep on the sofa.”“Shaped like a boat” or coffin – “awakens to the train, to screams rising deep from one’s own throat.”
These are the days of political poetry – environment, race, caste, gender. One danger in political poems is that they mistake debate for poetry. The poems of this nature in this collection are based on emotions and hit home with images. parents of missing persons This is a case: “The poplar draws blood in the cold of the season. / Those who shoot and those who search should be surprised, / sitting down for food Or raising hands in prayer, / What keeps the falling snow on a distant hill white.
tent Where “children cry in gaza” is another political poem – where the poet tries to create an image, which might otherwise be a statement. Kashmiri poetry is a quatrain on missing persons. Donation, Rose Islands, self portrait with earmuffs, Confessions of a Mask, Mister Kerala, Chest Muscles, OCD, Oracle They deserve close study, both for their intimate depictions and their broader socio-historical context. in poetry, cosmic microwave background radiationScience and the life of emptiness are the subject of molecular scanning – of text and materiality, of word and intention.
New poems in the book begin Lineand end with hook. They can be viewed as ledgers; And as a catch shark “Leaning / towards the sunset / spreading / across the sea / in a drop / of blood”- Another clever sentence.
The last part of the book is presented with 12 poems from Surendran’s previous collection, Available light. They are carefully selected to represent the range of poets, including family CourtWhich is one of his early poems. And there is an irony in the title and content of the previous book – a dichotomous combination of illumination that is apparently invisible, yet “available”.
His poems always remain hidden – you have to re-read and dig deeper to assess their inner story and meaning. The glimpses of hidden linguistic architecture work well in his poetry. Poetry is all about slow reading, slow digesting – where one has to peel away each metaphorical layer with studied patience and care.
The difference between early poetics and current poetics seems to me to be that language is often the subtext as it explores its visual and auditory resources. I remember he once said, “Whatever happens in life is essentially poetry.” And maybe it’s in this sense train window It is an important book. These days in India, when a new poetry volume is published every other day, when every second poet is showered with awards indiscriminately – this volume is a symbolic milestone in a miasmic maze-like poetic landscape.
train window There is an urgent mantra, a prayer carved on a knife’s edge – for a world where a perfectly weighty poetic line matters, where the architecture innate to the act of writing poetry is worth preserving.
Soak in these poems like you would soak in your own blood after a “duel” that is beyond your control – control their tone with a poise and elegance that allows you to eventually heal. In return“You just heard the river.“Now let’s go sailing,”bridging the distance between two stars“(Unit), and “calibrate to getmeasure of a manWith the hope of bringing wisdom to humanity.
Sudip Sen is a critically acclaimed poet, editor, translator and photographer. His last book, Anthropocene, won the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Award and the Wise Owl Literary Award. www.sudepsen.org
