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Sujata Bhatt. Point No Point: Selected Poems. Rolf Wienbeck, ill. Manchester, Eng. Carcanet. 1997.148 pages, ill. L7.95. ISBN 1-85754-306-8.
Sujata Bhatt's Point No Point contains a generous selection from her three previously published books, plus one new poem which lends the volume its title. She uses free verse with delicacy, poise, and effect. Her lines are tight, her metaphors unusual, and her range of themes wide.
In her first book, Brunizem (1988; see WLT 68:4, p. 884), the continents in which she has lived-Asia, Europe, and North America-are used as her poetic landscapes. In "Udaylee" she explores with haunting sentiment the state of menstruating women who are deemed untouchable during that period, according to the beliefs and practices in the Gujarati community of her childhood: "Only paper and wood are safe / from a menstruating woman's touch. / So they built this room / for us, next to the cowshed." Further, she describes, "This aching is my blood flowing against, / rushing something- / knotted clumps of blood, / so I remember fistfuls of torn seaweed / rising with the foam, rising."
Bhatt's Gujarati mother tongue figures prominently in the poems of...