News at Eleven: The disturbances had begun far back,

with the ethnic conflict in 1958; the brutally suppressed insurgency of the People's Liberation Front (JVP) in 1971; and the burning of the Jaffna Public Library by the police in 1981: all these helped shape the aesthetics of [Rudramoorthy] Cheran's poetry. Having matured in the 70s and the 80s of the last century in Sri Lankan history, his consciousness, imagination and idiom came to be moulded to a great extent by politics and violence, though his style did undergo changes, especially after the genocide when he found he could no more employ his old forms for the new poetry of the vanquished, the poetry of erasure rather than of witnessing.

from Frontline: Of resistance and loss

~~~~~~~~~~~