Yuyutsu R.D. Sharma

The ‘blinding snows of the Annapurnas ridge’ inspire a poetry that confronts natural magnificence with exuberant humanity. Yuyutsu R D Sharma’s generous vision embraces not only the landscape and its people but the lesser fauna, like the pigeons that speak ‘a kind of hushed speech that robbers might use’ and the mules on the Tibetan salt route, exhausted and bow-legged from hauling ‘cartons of Iceberg, mineral water bottles,/ solar heaters, Chinese tiles, tin cans…’ These vividly coloured, muscular and energetic poems have an atmosphere of freshness, as though the snow itself had rinsed and brightened them. Like the ‘waterfall beds that/ smelled of the birth of fresh fish’, they have the tangy, dust-free odour of language born of lived experience.

Carol Rumens, The United Kingdom

Yuyutsu RD Sharma brings the bracing airs of the Himalayas to any city. His vigorous, expansive and elemental poems leave Yeti tracks on the streets and mule trails on the Tube. They are packed with rapturous couplings of the urban and the feral.

Pascale Petit, Former Poetry Editor, Poetry London

Yuyutsu is a first-rate poet in English and an excellent place to begin if you want to get in touch with Nepalese writing today. 

William Seaton, in Bylines Interview

Yuyutsu’s subject is the intertwinement of the social and geographic, namely, how even the Himalayas were dirtied and damaged by partisan politics. In the poems, sacred energy appears in sexual, rather than theological, form; his incredibly tangy descriptions of crags and cliff faces swell with eroticism.

Jim Feast in The Brooklyn Rail, New York

Each poem is a delight in itself, a discovery, a new turn of phrase, a new sensation, a world of sound and light, and visions all colliding against each other to provide an unexpected and haunting experience.

David Clark in Exiled Ink, London

Yuyutsu RD lives close to Everest.  His poetry climbs mountains, swims in rivers, and paints the falling leaves in copper.  This tango with nature also occurs when Yuyutsu RD closes the window for a moment…

Ronny Someck in Iton77, Tel Aviv

The poems… are shining jewels of passion, energy and splendid craft, redolent with vivid, dreamlike visual imagery, strengthened by realistic observation and powered by strong male eroticism. His is an unabashed return to the male gaze that is refreshing and solemn by turns, reminding one of the stirring sounds of rolling drums, and beating rain…

Sucheta Das Gupta in The Himalayan Times, Kathmandu

A fiercely sublime poet …the book confirms an enormous talent, as well as purity of purpose with which he approaches his calling.  Lines jump out, burning themselves into your consciousness.

Eddie Woods in Amsterdam Weekly

With this buoyantly audacious work, Yuyutsu RD should be assured of his place in the canon of Asian poetry.

In this new volume, he conveys the people and places, the flora and fauna of the Annapurna area of Nepal with an exhilaratingly fresh vision.  It is poetry where pastoral elegy becomes fused with magic realism; where earthy common-sense mysticism becomes interlaced with a lush sexuality. The book is a voluptuous and loving evocation of Nepal and I admire its dramatic intensity.  

Cathal O Searcaigh, Ireland