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.