Praise for Maitreyabandhu's pamphlet, The Bond, winner of the Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition and shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award:
'Nostalgic, but not sentimental or wistful, the poems have a real sense of the here and now. They strike home' – Simon Armitage.
'The Bond shows how much can be achieved, by a poet of real ability, with the simplest, seemingly the most self-denying means: authenticity, clarity, faithfulness to experience or the memory of it, in an apparently artless language that has in fact been carefully worked into significant form' – Alan Jenkins, Michael Marks Awards (chair of judges).
'The Bond by Maitreyabandhu consists largely of fragments of blank verse autobiography, full of sharply registered sense impressions from which other meanings gradually loosen and lift… he also insists that a simple, resonant rightness is the hallmark of all true art' – Andrew McCulloch, TLS.
'The poems in this slim but satisfying pamphlet…characterised by a quiet lucidity of vision… lovingly recreate a world of small pleasures, discoveries and terrors' – Jem Poster, Poetry Review.
'…tactile, sensual, and often elegiac in tone… in a voice that is honest, thoughtful and engaging' – Stand.
'…shows a quiet scrupulosity in building an atmosphere and a sense of the waverings of memory through an accumulation of finely-observed detail' – Stride.
