S. Remesan’s is a poetry of witness that relentlessly speaks about the traumatic times we live in. They are poignantly lyrical and politically dauntless,articulating grief and oppression,dissonance and resistance in charged images like that of the house turning one morning in to a prison with walls all around and above, clocks that never show the right time,death lurking between the poem and the river,birds talking of poverty rather than flowers,cicadas dying in the bottle of poison,fish floating dead and fearful birds, wind smelling of gunpowder and the witches in Macbeth who keep chanting, ’Fair is fowl and fowl is fair’. These are poems of a man who wades through nightmares, a helpless witness to the murder of innocents embarrassed by failed revolutions and disturbed by the oppressive inequalities and injustices that he can do little about; it is only natural that they keep moving between the real and the surreal, the seas of pain and the islands of hope. K.SATCHIDANANDAN