Man is an amphibian’—said Huxley. But a poet seems to transcend this definition as he is more of an amphi-avian living in so many worlds together specially during the creative moments. All times are one time and all spaces are squeezed into one intense dot of some mercurial inspiration. Creativity, after all, is all plasmic and parabolic.
As a matter of fact, the creative writer during his creative hours performs himself and replays his lost/forgotten child-ness as if in a park. There is swing, there is a slide and also a revolving disk to go around and round in dizzy raptures with eyes shut and with a howling mouth open. The poet-turned-playing kid seems to be oned with the whole surrounding—the green grass, the little hedges, plants and the blooming branches in the park.And the setting sun is mauve-ed behind a grim tree with dangling green fingers like dancing Hasta-Mundras in an evening breeze. The whole scene is just Leela, i.e. play without effort in the Murrayesque definition. 
Satendra Nandan—the poet-cum-child—similarly performs a poetic leela in the midst of his surroundings. In the whole gamut of his poetry and other creative writing as well, there are marked poetic swings between nostalgia and the is-ness of ah-ful things he sees to have found himself caught in. His oeuvre suggests that as poet he has always been living between as least two worlds the one existing in his memories (both personal and ancestral) and the other being sown in and rooted down the landscape he has by dint destiny been born to live in work in for ever. The tug of war between the poets was and the present oceanic landscape that literally breathes and floats in, is a constant thematic concern and marked perpetual-ity of Satendras poetic credo. The temporality of his present existence is silhouetted against the perpetual-ity of his gone-by (but not forgotten) world. His is a poetry of palimpsest and tradition is just a scaffold.
A man with multifarious experiences Satendra has lived through Parliament, coups, migration, exile and return, the poet at the same time has been successful in building up an iconic poetic and public personality out of his personal experiences. The vast capital and legacy Satendra has inherited from his forefathers, has been constantly clamouring within his being for a voice with reverberating echoes, of course. No wonder, most of his poems emerge in a pupal stage like that of butterfly or at times in the imago stage after which, since a poem is metaphorically a butterfly, the wings of imagination begin to flutter.All good poetry –I had once written in one of my articles—is a search for the roots in ones personal and impersonal past. Quite often this quest turns into a search and searchinto a discovery and discovery, since it is conducted by a creative writer, tends to yield to a sort of an invention. Satendra, the poet, too seems to ransack his past in order to make a discovery and re-invent his Fijian identity which in course of time tends to gain an international paradigm, transcending, thus, the local bounds. A poem like ‘The Gifts of Girmitiyas’ reads like a perfect example to justify the argument.
You gave us the gift of a journey 
And made us friends we knew not 
In a single step, a silent knot- 
You bound our lives to so many.

So many endless nights at sea 
So many dark days on the shore, 
What and for whom was it all for? 
Flung like stars into a blue eternity.

Islands sailed close to our heart 
Strangers became sisters, brothers, 
Nananani, ajiaajwa, fathersmothers
Living together but worlds apart?

Many gifts of the magi you brought 
Shared, sacrificed, blessed and died; 
In blood-bondage you fate was tied: 
Smell of the sea still fresh in the net.

We remember you from a distant shore: 
Across the seas you crossed is our flight- 
A severed kite falling in a starry night 
Breaking hearts for music heard no more.

That soil of memory haunts our face- 
Trembling the greenfields of bitter 
Cain Your pain flows in our landless vein- 
As we feel the gift of a peoples grace.

You are our glory, our deepest grief 
You are the poems of a living land- 
Giving meaning to every gain of sand, 
And to every beloved tree, a green leaf.

(The Loneliness of Islands, 53)
The very opening line containing the expressions the gift of a journey bespeaks of the poets search for roots. In a world of super computers and micro-chips and nano- existences when life is zeroed down to cultural black-hole, human life has just become a race and is no longer a journey. But not many centuries ago, it used to be a journey. While race robs one of all sorts of fast-packing-back experiences, the journey retains a perpetually replenishing treasure of experiences floating past the traveller.
The human urge for company and companionship especially after landing in alien surroundings has created a kutumb-like feeling so well poetically referred to in the lines:
Islands sailed close to our heart 
Strangers became sisters, brothers, 
Nananani, ajiaajwa, fathersmothers
Living together but worlds apart?
The gifts of the Girmitiyas take back to the poets imagination to the Bibilical legend of the gift of the magi - yet another way of giving and searching for roots in the mythical past of human existence.The alien spaces provide the poet with images of time as if space and time are oned into a single whole metaphorically for the poet in the lines we remember you from a distant shore, across the seas you crossed is your flight.And finally flow the most sublime and sensitive lines from the poets pen when he says:
You are our glory, our deepest grief 
You are the poems of living land -
Most of the poems in the collection Loneliness of Islands exemplify this distinct search for roots and the preservation of past legacy by the poet. It is worth-noticing that a diasporic writer as Satendra is, is well-equipped with a twin baggage of past legacy and therefore he finds himself in a more advantageous position to put this vast heritage to poetic use (provided) he has mastered the art of carrying this huge load so lightly, and not as a burden at all. In fact it is his real treasure, his genuine capital, upon which he creates a rich and splendid poetry-dom and of which he remains its uncrowned monarch.

(Anuraag Sharma)