KUREEPPUZHA SREEKUMAR is a poet who has carried Malayalam poetry forward by fashioning an idiom to suit the present by judiciously drawing material from the folk traditions. For 25 long years, he has been a familiar figure at poets’ gatherings, reciting his works in a stentorian voice. A man with strong secular convictions, he once declined a State award for the reason that it bore the name of a god.

The volume under review is a collection of nearly 200 poems he wrote over the past 35 years. Some of them are light verses which he calls “naked poetry.”Witnessing agony from poetry’s kangaroo pouch, Sreekumar seeks to give expression to it. What he pours out are not personal woes but the woes of the society. Borrowing his own lines, one can say his poetry burns and runs through the veins like lava.

At one level, he is a poet of the people who remains close to the rich folk poetry of the land. At another level, he is a cerebral poet who throws teasers at the readers. He also provides food for thought with punchy observations. Consider this: “Gandhi read the Gita daily and carried it with him everywhere, and so did Godse.”

Unsparing in his criticism of communalism, he employs satire with telling effect. In one poem, he says the young girl was raped by eight Hindus, six Muslims, and four Christians, and exclaims, “Communal harmony!”