Simplicity of language and phrase-making are the hallmarks of Malachi Edwin Vethamani’s poetry. Feelings, events, non-events, happenings — Life Happens as a natural course of action — and he records them with sensitivity that only an acute poet’s eye and ear can do. More importantly, he explores important issues such as the complications and fractures of longing, heartbreak, exile and sexuality in Malaysian society.

• Sudeep Sen, author of EroText (Vintage: Penguin Random House) and The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry (editor)

As with Edwin’s first collection, the poems in Life Happens are deceptively simple. Read with patience and reflected upon afterwards, they reveal a depth and richness of the poet’s engagement with life i.e. with people, and even with creatures and other alive things. The best poems in the collection deal with human encounters. The existential meanings that these poems point to do need to be pondered on. One may profit from doing so. In our time when it becomes the fashion for poets to write poems which are so highly intellectualized that they tend towards being intellectual/cultural puzzles rather than poems, and for poets to speak as ‘poems’ the first thing that enters their heads, we should be grateful for someone like Edwin who does the old fashion thing, writing simply and from the heart.

• WONG PHUI NAM, Malaysian poet, with several volumes of poetry beginning with How the Hills are Distant in 1968. An Acre of Day’s Glass: Collected Poems was published in 2006

Life Happens shows a poet at home with concerns social, personal, and philosophical. The childhood of memory and the hard work of immigrant labourers are painted in such vivid tones, while the personal poems are as sharp as spears. But the soul also selects his own society in the last part of the book, with its Joycean pairing of ‘the living’ and ‘the departed’. ‘When I’m gone’, the poet writes, ‘the waves will return/ the moon grow full./ When I’m gone/ my sorrow will cease/ my heart stilled’. But life will still happen for Malachi Edwin Vethamani, who with this collection shows he is at the height of his considerable powers as a poet.

• DANTON REMOTO is a Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Ateneo and is the Dean of the School of Journalism as well as the President of The Manila Times College. He has published 20 books of poetry, essays, and fiction. In 2015, he received the National Achievement Award in Poetry from the Writers’ Union of the Philippines.

Here’s a natural poet who chooses to clarify rather than mystify, elucidate rather than obfuscate, educate rather intimidate his readers – which makes his work a genuine pleasure to read, never a chore. He writes about every day, down-to-earth matters – wry observations on being human, the ambivalence of family dynamics – each poem a poignant insight captured in simple, unboastful words. Indeed, what first drew me to Malachi Edwin Vethamani’s poetry was the fact that his crisp, precise and masterful syntax reminded me a lot of my own (but here the similarity ends, for we each focus on entirely different segments of the reality spectrum). A conscientious and dedicated educator, as well as an accomplished editor, Edwin is best described as a true missionary of letters.

• ANTARES MAITREYA, formerly known as Kit Leee, writer, musician, blogger, jungle chef. His publications include ADOI! (Times Books International, 1989) and Moth Balls: Scatological & Eschatological Poems (Magick River, 1994)