What good luck it is to have a selection of Subodh Sarkar’s powerful poems in English translation. This is a happy day for literature."
– Christopher Merrill, American poet, the Director of IWP at the University of Iowa and author of Self-Portrait with Dogwood.
“Reading Subodh’s love poems, one tends to understand that here is a poet with a different voice where boldness and disquietness co-exist…His voice is farm and like a whip lash when against corruption and painful when he identifies himself with the marginalised.
Sometimes, contemporary events crop up in his poetry such as the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha, the careless statement made by the pious Pope in Delhi, Iraq war or the suicide of an old teacher.”
-Sunil Gangopadhyay, Bengali poet and novelist and the founder editor of Krittibas.
"Here is a set of poems that look at the world with a child’s instinct for mischief, an adult’s sense of humour and a philosopher’s sense of paradox. Language here looks at reality with a squint, as it were, and reality confronts language with a sneer to make sure we live in a post-Modern world where irony becomes a world-view."
– K. Satchidanandan, Indian poet and critic writing in Malayalam and English.
Subodh Sarkar’s poems shimmer with an audacity of simplicity, openness and lucidity which mark his poetic idioms subtle, specific and razor-sharp where the poetic corpus retains as an inviting discourse. Love is a companion of the poetic soul. The poet wants to sign in the ‘peace accord’ of minds. Subodh Sarkar allows his poetry to speak for an artist’s responsibility towards life, contexts and manners of the time. These poems bring out the poet’s social, historical, political and economic dimensions to the reading world. He celebrates things happening around him every day; humbled by time’s magic hands. This is a selection from the poems he has written over the last four decades.
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