Ramlochan, an experienced literary critic and editor, pours her erudition of multiple literatures and spiritual traditions into her dense, long-lined poems. They are poems of productive confusion, where genders, pronouns, religions and myths merge in the body of each poem’s speaker, who is comfortably, wilfully multiple. Ramlochan’s is an invocatory poetry; the first poem, ‘A Nursery of Gods for My Half-White Child’, calls on Ganesh, Kali, Shiva, Krishna and Saraswati, saying “some names come before your mother’s”. The poems wrestle with the overwhelming power of the divine (and the) feminine: when the gods return, in the penultimate poem ‘Vivek Considers the Nature of Secrets’, Krishna becomes Vivek’s rough lover.
