Poppies in Translation

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 voi…