SIDDHARTHA Menon’s new poetry collection Lone Pine (Hachette India) carries 68 poems, most of which have titles inspired by the natural world: leaves, fog, river mornings. Topography teaches the poet and his readers about life. The book has been divided into three parts: Settings, Stirrings, and Bearings. 

In the first part, Menon sets the tone of the book, catching the world around him in its displacement. Everything is ‘out of sync’, ‘out of place’, or ‘out of time’. A lone pine in an unfrequented alley, a eucalyptus plant that’s an outsider to the native earth, coolness arriving unexpectedly one summer morning. “Out-of-syncness is a threat. / But here disparate noises are harmonized,” he writes in a later poem ‘Concert’.

Siddhartha Menon