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Carole Satyamurti (1939-2019) was a poet, translator and sociologist. For many years she taught at the Tavistock Clinic in London, where her main academic interest was in the relevance of psychoanalytic ideas to an understanding of the stories people tell about themselves. She co-edited Acquainted with the Night: psychoanalysis and the poetic imagination (2003). Her retrospective, Stitching the Dark: New & Selected Poems (2005) drew on five previous collections, two of which were Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Her translation, Mahabharata: A Modern Retelling (W.W. Norton, 2015), was joint winner of the inaugural Roehampton Poetry Prize.
No matter how compelling her themes, with their demands of compassion and political conscience, Satyamurti never loses hold of her main topic: the capacity of language. -- Bernard O’Donoghue * Poetry London * Carole Satyamurti’s poems look to be stations on a road map of psychological discoveries, sometimes personal, sometimes objective and scientific. Her best poems are not so much confessions as meditations. -- Anne Stevenson * London Magazine * Her unobtrusive approach is deceptive – these poems have unexpected stings in their tails. -- Penelope Shuttle
