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Review: Window With a Train Attached by CP Surendran
The poems in this new collection attempt to communicate the inexpressibility and the essence of human existence
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. There is lightness of seeing when the poet views the world, and the metaphors used are powerfully imagistic. The book contains 90-odd new poems, and a dozen representing his earlier body of work, spanning nearly four decades . But the new ones, especially, the ‘quatrains’, are a study of the craft of compression:
Below the years, behind your eyes, at the bottom of the clockA whole hill ticks away in a rose. We see it, but cannot feelIts 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. He is on the whole more suicidal than murderous though, as in the ironized 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 tantalizingly autobiographical.
The poem, The Day After, is a good place to go for a deep critic — where the poet is trying to stake everything on the hallucination of his experience, as perceived. “Pale dawn floating face up in the rain-wrecked stream. / Behind the mourning house, the fat mice of far hills /Scurrying back to nibble the leftovers at night. / ... Now that I’m gone, son, are your free? /Dead, still I bless thee.” “Rain-wrecked” is a clever alliterative pun on ‘train-wrecked’, as we hurtle through life’s juggernauts and enjambments. It 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 a mother and son relationship. It is quite unbearable, the beauty and the transient nature of it all.
But is the poet all done? Of course not — it is merely an Invitation. This poem opens with — “Put out with wine the heart’s old, purple fire, wait; / Watch an absence thrive white in the wild jasmine / Breaking out on vines. Come in April when the house is / On fire.” Whether it be the cruelest month or not, it is merely the beginning — a moment when the creative and mental fires are just lit — their conflagration poised to live long and burn far. After all, in burning lies rejuvenation.
In I Am Nearly Not There, the other long poem in the book — what is attempted is the nearly inexplicable life story of the French symbolist poet, Arthur Rimbaud, who ended his poetic career when he was 20, and ended up as a coffee and gun trader in Africa, away from the compulsive festivalistas of the world. His life and adventures offer to the narrating voice an objective-correlative, perhaps to his life situation: To Cypress, quarrying stone, inanimate, hard / Like a rake’s heart… / Sober as a glass of absinthe undrunk. / …Empty as the sea / Emptying on Aden’s shores, / Where the sands halt the anabases of undone kings: / … an attempt to escape without trace / From the disease of naming things …
In general, the poems here are characterised by a strong sense of rhythm. Most of the ‘quatrains’ old-fashionably rhyme, and sometimes are Shakespearean in feel, perhaps to help the poet to cut his obsessional thoughts. Even in those poems where no clear auditory scheme is resorted to, the essential cadence is sure-footed. For instance, these lines from a prose poem, Return, whose subject 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, plaintive as a prayer unheard.”
Through the poems, one senses a process of a fraught, if unrelenting confrontation with the self — representing our own unresolved saga of inner conflict, the truest war we might possibly wage. Consider Duel where the narrator’s “enemy”, “With a knife in hand is risen again / from dust”, in a place where “the bougainvillea mixes / The sun with flowers and leaves / Like the sherbet / That shadows drink.” 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, Surendran’s effort seems to be — pin down with images, the hallucinatory quality of experience. Perhaps because of this, his poetry often takes on a quality of farewell, partings informed by the wasa-bi of things — instanced even in a hopeful poem, Invitation: “Put out with wine the heart’s old, purple fire, wait; / Watch an absence thrive white in the wild jasmine / Breaking out on vines. Come in April when the house is / On fire. Or in June when the lone boy up in the loft / Flings rain like crushed glass… / Come any time really, the moon here is mortgaged to silence…” The diction is almost noirish — but always measured, set in the metered architecture of verse-structure, punctuated and controlled by cadence.
Interestingly, there are many animal poems here. They seek a kind reinterpretation. Endling is about a snail, the last of its kind: “What’s a snail’s fury, asked Thom Gunn. / It’s the little man at war with the tyranny of his limitations / And, beaten, crawling back to the sun.”
Others animals to whom the poet transfers his ‘outsiderness’ include the serpent (East of Eden), owl (“Once I froze, saw an owl swoop…circle church-bound men, / Transporting a rat, his forefeet joined in prayer, to Christ in heaven.”), moth (“Gathered from carbon, the kimono sleeves / Of your wings span a million years / …You are vanished forests circling my lamp.”), and shark.
The tiger poem is wittily titled, Taiga. The animal cries poem, Howl, apart from its Ginsbergian pun, is a statement, an allusion to the current social and political discourse — one that occurs more often than not — on a banal and unintelligent level. The poet Growls, half-asleep on a couch “shaped like a boat” or coffin — lies “awake to the train, to the howls risen deep from his own throat.”
These are the days of political poems — the environment, race, caste, gender. A danger inherent in political poems is their tendency to mistake polemics for poetry. The poems that are of this nature in this collection make good on emotion and strike home with images. Parents of Disappearing Persons is a case in point: “The chinar draws blood through the season’s chill. / Those who shoot and those who seek must wonder, / Sitting down to a meal or raising their hands in prayer, / What keeps the snow white falling on the distant hill.”
Tabernacle where “Babies in Gaza cry” is another political poem — where the poet tries to make an image do, what might otherwise, be a statement. The Kashmiri poem is a quartet on missing persons. Offertory, Gulab Archipelago, Self-portrait with a Bandaged Ear, Confessions of a Mask, Mr Kerala, Chest Muscles, OCD, Oracle are well worth close study — both for their intimate portraiture and for their wider socio-historical context. In the poem, Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, science and life of nothingness is the subject of the molecular scanning — of text and materiality, of word and intention.
The new poems in the book begin with Line, and end with Hook. Those can be seen as bookends; and the catch as in the Shark “hooked / To the sunset / Spreading / Through the sea / In one drop / Of blood” — another clever pun.
The last section of the book is brought up by 12 poems from Surendran’s earlier collection, Available Light. They are chosen with care to represent the poet’s range, including Family Court, which is one of his earliest poems. And there lies an irony in the earlier book’s title and content — a bipolar juxtaposition of illumination that is overtly unseeable, yet “available”.
His poems are always veiled — you have to reread and dig deep to assess their inner story and meaning. The trope of hidden linguistic architecture serves his poetry well. Poetry is all about slow reading, slow digestion — where one has to peel every metaphorical layer with studied patience and care.
The difference between the early poems and the present ones seem to me that often the language itself is the subtext as he explores its visual and auditory resources. I remember him once saying, “What happens in life, is basically poetry.” And perhaps it is in this sense that Window With A Train Attached is an important book. These days in India, when every other day a new poetry volume is published, when every other poet is indiscriminately showered with obscure awards — this volume is a signatory milestone in a miasmic maze-like poetic landscape.
Window With a Train Attached is an urgent incantation, a chiselled plea on a knife-edge — for a world where a perfectly weighted poetic line matters, where the architecture that is innate to the act of writing poetry is worth preserving.
Soak in these poems as you would soak in your own blood after a “duel” that is beyond your control — control their tenor with a poise and elegance that allow you to ultimately heal. In Return, “You heard the river now.” Now sail, “bridging the gap between two stars” (Unit), and calibrate to get “the measure of a man” with the hope of bringing sanity to humanity.
Sudeep Sen is a critically acclaimed poet, editor, translator and photographer. His last book, Anthropocene, won the Rabindranath Tagore Literature Award and the Wise Owl Literary Prize. www.sudeepsen.org
