‘Satchidanandan’s poetry is a lyre with many chords: it may seem light with joking tunes, it can be harsh and nearly cruel: sometimes it seems to unite all these characteristics together, especially when his poems have the form of a dialogue.’

Antonio Menniti Ipplito

‘In Satchidanandan, one notices a great modernity, a chosen but simple terminology of immediate understanding, something like a non-rhetorical dialogue with himself and with the reader, a wealth of symbology, a fascinating smoothness of the verses, a subtle irony.’

Carlo Savini

‘These are poems of great strength and power, a moving tribute to the generation in which we live.’

Jayanta Mahapatra

‘This is a dark, powerful, pulsating collection of poems, the effect of which continues to reverberate, disturb and shock one out of one’s complacency long after one has finished reading them.’

The Hindu

‘Satchidanandan’s poetry is an irresistible mix of the real, surreal, intellectual, sensual, and spiritual. Satchidanandan does not shy away from asking deeper existential questions—of being, freedom, love, compassion, nature, language and death.’

Shanta Acharya, Modern Poetry in Translation

‘K. Satchidanandan is definitely not a poet who keeps aloof from the world. He is a poet on a journey. Poetry for him is a cry against all walls . . . It is his cosmopolitanism that makes Satchidanandan interesting beyond India.’

Wolfgang Kubin

‘K. Satchidanandan belongs to the whole world since he sets before us wisdom and humour and the shock of surprise.’

Alan Titley

‘Satchidanandan is an important global poet. He distils and expresses humanity in a voice that is at once local and universal, individual and everyman’s. He is also a major English-language poet, due to the sterling quality of his self-translations from the original Malayalam. His poems are of perennial import; they sustain the spirit, speaking with equal eloquence to the mind and the heart.’

Philip Nikolayev