In "Girls on a Swing," the swing of mood she brings about in just eight lines is remarkable. The "Girl-on-a-swing, high-in-the-sky, free-as-a-bird," changes to "turn-as-a-bride, burn-as-a-bride" and floats up as "ash-in-the-sky... ash-in-the-eye." "The Road from Angkor" is a superb poem, unveiling the landscape of cruelty and fear under the horrible Pol Pot. Minefield and jungle, skull- mountains, terror images of lemur-eyes and bat musk, and "time's leprous hand" are all seen through the life of a shell-shocked woman. This poem needs to be anthologised. The stories in the book are intense and possibly even better than the poems, but this is not the place to discuss them.

Anand Thakore is an unlikely English poet. He is a Hindustani classical singer, a student of Pandit Satyasheel Pande to whom his book Waking in December is dedicated. He is into mandala and things, as the cover shows. From malkaus to the iambic pentameter, is an achievement. He is one poet who rhymes all the way through the book. Some of his work consists of straight landscape poems, like "Dusk over Azad Maidan" or "Creepers on a Steel Door". In his better poems he ferrets out old histories:

His name was Chandri - my grandfather once said -
Who was to live here, but died of plague. Each of us fails
In the end, but I was born in a house built for the dead;
On the red gate they hammered his name with nails.

The book's strength lies in the poems on sea voyages, the real ones and the imagined voyages to Ithaca and the Greece mainland. Just thinking of Greece makes the sea bluer and turns the moon to "an orange flare". Later of course, "dark flags, mastheads and green meshes" take over "Till slowly over the docks the moon returns to grey/ Salvages from time a minute - then anchors us to Bombay". The poem "Ithaca" deals with an entirely imagined voyage to Brindsi, Patras and Mycenae and of course to Odysseus and Penelope country, to "Ithaca, dream-home of the idle, dark hope of the damned".

Later in the book the rhymes become trite and creak a bit like gout in both knees. And, as in the poem "Cycle", the verse becomes ponderous: "Though night ushers me further into words" etc. But this is an interesting new voice, and we should hear more of Anand Thakore, both his thumris and his rhymed quatrains.

Mumbai poets take to the sea. T. R. Joy who sometimes gives joy, and sometimes doesn't, uses the sea metaphor to say other things: "The evening we met/ somewhere in me/ estuaries welled up, flooded into the sea". Thekkinieth Raphael Joy teaches English (most English poets do). Along with Prabhanjan Misra, he edits a good poetry magazine, Poiesis. He has a good turn of phrase: "the sun's red-drunk stare", "the evening draws the blind", "the fingers that gossip with the pallu". In an old fort "ramparts stalk the ghosts of buried headstones". In another poem we have the lines "the night in her eyes/ the ash in her face/ a lifetime of wanting/ dried in her womb". But he also has his lapses: "your dark and white twinkles", for instance. He is uncomfortable with the language at times and comes out with lines like "itching my being". In the poems on Mumbai the contrasts between slum and skyscraper, beggar and the capitalist become a little wearing. A poet should be able to see a cliche before he falls into it.

In a poem on Mandela, he talks of his hero being "auschwitzed/ in Robben Island". Auschwitz is a no-go area. You can't play with that, not even if you are describing Mandela's incarceration. Auschwitz is too horrendous a part of human history to be cheapened with over-use.

Gerson da Cunha's poems are like snapshots from a travelogue. The book, entitled So Far, has an introduction from Dom Moraes that sounds slightly patronising and ever so slightly pompous. Da Cunha is better known as a theatre man and has also been into advertising in a big way. He worked for 10 years with the UNICEF and travelled a lot to Africa and Latin America. Many poems relate to these continents. He has a poem on a "legislated sanctuary" near Dar es Salam - "Now lions may feed on the calf elephant/ ancient violence assured by law". He is in Kampala at sundown, "light's most difficult hour," and in the "labyrinths of sense" in Maputo. Yet the smells and colours of Africa or South America never come through. An assortment of brief scribbles, no matter how talented the writer, does not make a poetry volume.

In Buenos Aires, someone playing the charango (a banjo) "plucks an Andean sorrow/ from the strings like plumes". But the reader soon tires. Gerson never tries to sound the depths. However, one poem, "Rose Garden Barbecue," deserves to be quoted in full to round off this review:

The metal ornamental frame
of antelope and crested crane,
(little cups for oil and flame),
attracts a wandering curse.

At once the sleek designer fires
erupt as if at stake and pyre,
ignoring ways of white empire
to slake a primal thirst.

Darkness is the unseen fuel
ignited by an ancient duel,
privilege against renewal,
that chars the night to dust. 

* * *

Six, Revathy Gopal, Writer's Workshop, Calcutta, Rs. 150.

Waking in December, Anand Thakore, Harbourline (self-published?), Rs. 100.

Brooding in a Wound, T.R. Joy, Allied Publishers, Rs. 180.

So Far, Gerson da Cunha, HarperCollins, Rs. 150.