But the soul will be the colour of turmeric
    spilt on white atone.

And the creature who lives in the soul
will count with her thumb
on the joints of her fingers.

Time will be slow
and Time will be concrete
and Time will be stuck
like a wet crow peering down
from a tree, broken and black
from 'An India of the Soul'

The Stinking Rose is one of the names for a plant that arouses strong feelings: garlic. No one is neutral about it. Sujata Bhatt explores the various mythologies and the magical and practical aspects of garlic in a sequence of twenty-five parts, is also haunted by places, especially Vancouver Island (where the author lived and worked for six months), and by her native India. Europe is also present, a place of sometimes reluctant abode. There is a dialogue between new worlds and old, intensifying towards the end of the volume in a series of experimental poems, building on the experience of those celebrated earlier `bilingual' poems which bring Gujarati and English together.