Guest and Host records the experience of being welcomed into the household of a foreign country. At some distance from the travel-book viewpoint of the outsider-looking-in, Winter is able to capture the country in a deeper light through staying rather than travelling, and living rather than merely observing. The sonnet-sequence ‘Guest and Host’ is complemented by a powerful poem on the 2001 earthquake at Kutch; a fascinating sequence based on the reminiscences of an infantry officer of the British Raj; and a dramatic poem on Durga, the goddess of Calcutta’s annual festival of Durga Puja.