India, Feb. 7 -- 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 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, 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. 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. 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 became 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-fashionedly rhyme, 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, in which 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. These are the days of political poems. A danger inherent in political poems is their tendency to mistake polemics for poetry. The poems 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 - where the poet tries to make an image do, what might otherwise be a statement. 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. His poems are always veiled; one must reread and dig deep to assess their inner story and meaning. The trope of hidden linguistic architecture serves his poetry well. 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, and 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....