The business of poetry, as Doshi puts it in one of her poems in this collection, is "prising open hearts of things in her hands". And Doshi’s remarkably good at it, stripping away skin, fibre, muscle to expose with tender ruthlessness the living heart of things. Her craft is evident whether she is describing houses "going on emeraldshoes,/ Colliding on streets, spitting/ Bits of brick and splinter on our sleeves",the old eucalyptus tree blocking the driveway after "travelling for years, lascivious for Indian earth", or merely the noise ofMadras—"How cars in reverse sing Jingle Bells/ And scooters have larynxes of lorries".
Death and dereliction mark most of Doshi’s poems but what remains is not the dead weight of despair so much as the luminous lines her flame-tipped poet’s pen conjures.
