Sujata Bhatt

"One of our most beloved contemporary poets", is how former Ireland Professor of Poetry Paula Meehan describes Philip Casey (1950-2018). Cherished by many for his tenderness, fortitude, hope and tenacity, Philip was an award-winning novelist, admired poet and vital presence on the Irish literary scene for four decades. Philip battled repeated health challenges, stood up for causes he believed in, and relished making mischief. He was, in the words of the poet Theo Dorgan, "some man for one man". Philip believed in the idea of a community of writers, and his open-mindedness drew others towards him - whether to his Dublin home, or to his grassroots support base in his earlier home of Hollyfort, Co Wexford. His booming laugh and powerful handshake were legendary. The many contributors, including Sebastian Barry, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Dermot Bolger, Moya Cannon and Thomas Lynch, praise Philip Casey's gifts as a writer of poetry and fiction, as well as highlighting their admiration for him as a man.

This new collection from Sujata Bhatt is a treasury of stories that recur to the poet in response to something seen, heard or dreamt. They come as living memory.

Indonesia, South Africa, Estonia, Lithuania, Shetland, Nicaragua – many worlds meet in these poems as nature dyes Sujata Bhatt’s many languages with its own hues. The real merges with the surreal and the allegorical, certainties are undone in an open-ended quest. A Chinese cook ignores a predatory snake, a heart surgeon lives most intensely between operations, Gregor Samsa’s sister proposes a different sort of metamorphosis, someone listens to the Holy Ghost sing, a woman hears her daughter’s voice in birdsong – and the ‘poppies in translation’ mutate according to the languages and histories they inhabit, ultimately persisting in a space beyond language. At times, language itself is injured by history: Bhatt reimagines the ‘haunted undertow’ of post-war German as experienced by Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. Meanwhile, the poppies are ever-present, ‘with their black souls in the wind’.

This book gathers four decades of writing, published in collections from Brunizem in 1988 to Pure Lizard in 2008. It maps the poet's trajectory, following her exile from her homeland, India, and her mother tongue, Gujarati, to the landscapes and languages of the USA and then Europe. Urgent, compassionate and inventive, Bhatt's work forms a uniquely sustained project of reinvention and rediscovery.

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. Sujata Bhatt is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary poetry. She is, the New Statesman declared, 'one of the finest poets alive', and alive in a unique way to issues of politics and gender, to place and history, to different cultural and linguistic traditions.

Sujata Bhatt's first book of poems, the award-winning Brunizem, appeared in 1988. In a very short time she has gained recognition as one of the distinct and reckonable new voices. She has things to say about her native India and her native tongue (Gujarati), about America and Britain, and about Germany where she now lives. She is, the New Statesman declared, 'one of the finest poets alive', and alive in a unique way to language, to issues of politics and gender, to place and history. Her's is a remarkable complete imagination, generous and at the same time unsparingly severe in its quest for the difficult truths of experience.

The stinking rose is one name for garlic. This collection includes a sequence of 25 poems which explore the mythologies and the practical aspects of garlic. Divided into five parts, the book is also haunted by places - Vancouver Island, the poet's native India, and Europe. A dialogue between new worlds and old intensifies in a series of "bilingual" poems which bring Gujarati and English together.