Love Poems from a Frangipani Garden

The sensuous imagery and courageous protest are at the service of a moral mind. In this new collection, the poet’s concerns have been altered by ‘that other one / who may turn out lover or scorching sun’. But a romantic meeting is not the book’s entire theme. True, ‘the body’s / sinuous trail of / rising desire’ runs through the book, with its garden in the city, like water. The poet asks what will be left of all this experience, in the end? Seeking to answer that she imagines migrant refugees in the Mediterranean and villagers after a tsunami, memorialises her father in his life crossing the river into which she is scattering his ashes, narrates the lifelong actions of a simple villager drawing water from a well, visits the caves of Buddhas or gods; and although ‘There are places that will / Never be known to us / The deepest recesses / That we’ll refuse to enter’, although a lover may betray and the flowers of the garden are scattered, the poet attempts to - perhaps does - find deliverance in kindness, the end of illusion, and the recovery of love in song.                        Leslie Bell, Mica Press.