The hot air balloon convention floats
above our garden - weeks pass
but no one wants to come down.
At first the firemen stood by, ready
with their longest ladders,
their life nets and jumping sheets.
But now they've taken off
in their own, fire-red, hot air balloons:
Giant fireballs that dare to compete with the sun.
Who can look after the roses when the sky
ripples and throbs with so much passion?

from 'Looking Up'

'Augatora' is not a new word: it is a word lost from language a millennium ago. In Old High German it meant, more or less, 'eye gate' ('window' with an inbuilt etymology).

The windows in this book open on real and imagined land- and cityscapes. India, past and present, remains 'a necessary obsession'. Here also we see Durban, Riga, New Orleans, Amsterdam, Jerusalem, Barcelona, and the small island of Juist off the German North Sea coast, site of her long poem 'The Hole in the Wind', broadcast by BBC Radio Drama. Memory, science, language, history and love remain Bhatt's themes; she amply justifies the New Statesman claim that she is 'one of the finest poets alive' - alive in many different ways.