This collection brings together seventy-five poems by three internationally known Tamil poets, whose works, over the last three decades, have dealt with issues ranging from ethnicity and nationalism, to religion and diaspora. Together they have shaped the Tamil literary tradition, urging the reader to look at the past and present in new and important ways. All three poets have confronted the reality of Sri Lankan violence, displacement, and struggle in different ways, but reading them together reveals both connections and differences.


Cheran is a poet and journalist based in Toronto. Born in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, Cheran was the deputy editor of the Saturday Review, the only independent English-language weekly in Sri Lanka between 1981 and 1987. Cheran's published anthologies include The Second Sunrise, The Lord of Death, The Song of Mirage, The Procession of Skeletons, and At the Time of Burning. Cheran was the editor of We'll Live Amidst Death, an anthology of Tamil resistance poetry published in 1985 and 1997 in Sri Lanka and India. Cheran's poetry has been translated into English, German, Sinahala, and Dutch. For the past ten years, Cheran has been an editor of Sarinihar, a Tamil-language bi-monthly newspaper dedicated to uncensored coverage of the ongoing civil war in Sri Lanka.

VIS Jayapalan lives in Oslo

Puthuvai Ratnathurai's present whereabouts are unknown