Window With a Train Attached

Window With a Train Attached gathers about ninety new poems by C.P. Surendran. They are lyrical meditations on spiritual dispossession, a sense of estrangement from existence itself. The poems explore the unsettling idea that we can never fully possess our lives even as we live them, except perhaps by recreating them in art.

They also wrestle with the pairing of beauty and transience: how to hold the splendour of life alongside its brevity, in vanishing sunsets, fleeting lovers and the impermanence of sailing stars. Every welcome, the poems suggest, carries an unspoken farewell.

The imagistic, lyrical intensity of the verse balances the deep sense of loss it conveys. That loss is not only personal but shared, and the poems side with the victims of the human condition, as in Tabernacle, a poem inspired by Gaza.