‘The instruments Surendran uses to incise us serve a double purpose. While his needles, knives and swords inflict further damage on our increasingly broken bodies, they also, in most cases, miraculously heal… I have never seen the paradoxical nature of wounding—both inflicted and curative—better expressed.’—Adil Jussawala
‘[These poems] are like incantations muttered by a profane priest, using memory to rake the soul of the heart. They travel huge distances, these poems, and come to us as from a far war-torn altar where blessings and prayers arise…in the hope that poetry might some day straighten out a crooked world.’—Jerry Pinto
The 90-odd new poems in this volume are lyrical meditations on spiritual dispossession—an estrangement from the very fact of existence. These poems explore the unsettling truth that we cannot fully possess our lives, even as we live them, except perhaps through their recreation in art. They grapple with the paradox of beauty and transience: how to reconcile the splendour of life with its fleeting nature—vanishing sunsets, ephemeral lovers, and the impermanence of sailing stars. Every welcome carries, at its heart, an unspoken farewell.
The lyrical and imagistic intensity of these poems serves as a counterbalance to the profound sense of loss they evoke. This sense of loss is not merely personal but universal, aligning itself politically and emotionally with the victims of the human condition—exemplified by the Gaza-inspired poem Tabernacle in this collection.