RESULTS

'Augatora' is a word lost from language. 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. Memory, science, language, history, and love remain Bhatt's themes. Places featured in the poems include Durban, Riga, New Orleans, Amsterdam, Jerusalem, Barcelona, and the small island of Juist off the German North Sea coast, setting of the long poem, 'The Hole in the Wind', which has been broadcast by BBC Radio Drama.

Transformation is the underlying theme of Sujata Bhatt's new collection, the title deriving from a mystical being with skin that is 'pure lizard'. The natural world is ever present in these poems; monkeys, crickets and bats reappear in new incarnations, and a field of organic sunflowers in Pennsylvania is juxtaposed with sunflowers grown out of the toxic soil of Chernobyl. Pure Lizard also documents artistic exchange in its many forms: Schiller's desk is taken to Buchenwald during the Second World War, and Jane Eyre haunts a laboratory in Baltimore. There are poems in response to music by composers as varied as Telemann, Bob Zieff, and Philip Glass, as well as a poetic correspondence with the Welsh writer Gillian Clarke about a writer's sense of home and place, to be broadcast by BBC Radio Drama.