Laksmi Pamuntjak

Praise for "Ellipsis":

• Aesthetically intense and powerfully sensual poetry collection. The poetry is attuned, meticulous, deft and the reader is transfigured by a 'lea of silences.'

  - The Herald UK (Scotland)

• Lyrical and elegiac, Laksmi Pamuntjak's poetry moves you with the speed of a heartache.

  - Felix Cheong, author of Temptation and Other Poems and Broken by the Rain, Recipient of the National Arts Council's Young Artist of the Year for Literature Award, 2000

• Pamuntjak writes in the introspective style that is at once intimate -- but also, in the poet’s own words – ‘giddy, glowing, red hot

  - Cyril Wong, author of Squatting Quietly, Below: absence, the end of his orbit

• Ellipsis shows the working of a feminine sensibility, a refined one at that, in exploring human (woman) being in her full-spectrum: roles, relations, desires, wounds, memories. The poems are the word not said in speech; the way of the subtle arising unannounced: the timelessness in the temporal, the extraordinary out of the ordinary, absence in presence - echoed through and through in Laksmi's poems.

  - Nukila Amal, author of Cala Ibi and Laluba

• "Ellipsis contains some of the freshest, most sensual poems I have ever read. Laksmi Pamuntjak splays the mess and fragility, the embarrassing physicality, of human relationships. But she spans a far broader canvas - politics, religion, the touch and smell of many lands - and perhaps most importantly for an artist, with an unresolved aesthetic intensity, immanent in every one of her texts is the question, why? From the miniaturized Hieronymus Bosch ‘The Tree Man’ on the book’s cover, Ellipsis takes us on a journey across continents, through the brush of forest leaves, the pungent aroma of diesel fumes, the dank, entangled limbs of lovers, the intimate ferocity of motherhood, the blinding, white concrete of cityscapes-without-end, all inspissated with a “lea of silences.” Through this substrate of “human dough” and Bourbon, from ‘Shanghai Rising’ to ‘Dawn’s Antigone’, surely “neither sin nor Satan” could have conceived such a box of song and text. In both the verse poetry and the prose poetry (or ‘poetic prose’ - but such divisions in any case are arbitrary), the writing is diamond-cut yet visceral, suffused with intellect yet shamanic. Pamuntjak is ‘A Composer Driving in the Rain’, a “peddler” of wondrous tangents, cracked vessels, “wounds without poultice”. In Ellipsis, there are no masks, no mirrors, just truth, caught momentarily like a silhouette, like “ashes falling before [our] eyes”. Pamuntjak’s poetic ear is so attuned, her eye so meticulous, her fingers so deft that at times, sometimes by passion, sometimes by mere nuance, like a rasik the reader is transfigured. And so, we move through the rational, the intuitive, the spiritual, to the beyond…”

  - Suhayl Saadi, author of Psychoraag

• ... hard not to get caught up in the (poems') sheer energy and celebration of language, or as Pamuntjak writes, 'a world of the word.

  - The Straits Times (Singapore)