Brunizem is an impressive first collection of poems by a young Indian woman poet about whom we shall no doubt hear more. Sujata Bhatt is at least tri-cultural. Born in Ahmedabad, India, in 1956, she lived for a number of years in the USA and is currently married and residing in Germany.

Fluent in Gujarati, she writes poems that are bilingual and clearly multicultural in perspective. "Search for my Tongue," for example, incorporates entire lines of Gujarati script, including their romanized spelling, to enabe the reader to see and to hear the sounds and rhythms of this "other language". Her bilingual poetics is never exotic but intrinsically participates in the thematics of recovering an "other" experience which lies outside those accessible to the English language. As the poem declares with moving clarity:

You ask me what I mean
by saying I have lost my tongue
I ask you, what would you do
if you had two tongues in your mouth
and lost the first one, the mother tongue,
and could not really know the other,
the foreign tongue.
You could not use them both together
even if you thought that way.
And if you lived in a place you had to
speak a foreign tongue,
your mother tongue would rot,
rot and die in your mouth.

This first collection is marked by an interrogative self-consciousness concerning the use of English as poetic self-expression, an interrogation that is perhaps inevitable to non-western English-language writers. In this way, her poems continue the post-colonial dialogue on the relation between the colonial language and the poet's society which we find in earlier generations of third-world writers such as Kamala Das, Wole Soyinka and Ngugi Wa Thiong'o.

Yet the situation for the bilingual poet is more complicated than that of conflict between an abandoned mother tongue and a foreign tongue. Sujata Bhatt demonstrates over and over again that English is not simply a foreign tongue for her. As much as she intellectually acknowledges the wretched colonizing history that has led to the domain of English among non-western people, she asserts the poet's love and veneration of the language in which she has her being:

Which language
has not been the oppressor's tongue?
Which language
truly meant to murder someone?
And how does it happen
that after the torture,
after the soul has been cropped
with a long scythe swooping out
of the conqueror's face-
the unborn children
grow to love that strange language.

What makes the poetry memorable, also, is Bhatt's clear unstrained voice that celebrates a sensuous and strongly female sensibility and an intense metaphysical turn of mind. Thus, "Eurydice Speaks" creates a female persona addressing Orpheus in a Maine that is sharply geographical and lyrical: 'Pussy willows, cattails, forsythia suddenly / awaken junipers tipped with pale new shoots./ The wind flings pine cones my way.'

The physical details hold the reader firmly:

Nights they [the lizards] lingered on the walls;
followed thick insects across the ceiling
while I squirmed in bed
entwined with shadows of leaves and lizards.
Their black eyes: round mustard seeds glistened.

even as the metaphysical takes over the text in indeterminate and sensuously open transformations:

That's when my dreams become lizards:
delicate feet walk up my neck...
like soft paintbrushes thick with colour...
Let's finger paint with all your tongues and lips
and sperm across our hips.

The 110 pages of poems in Brunizem deserve re-reading. The title word is a neologism compounded of French and Russian elements and refers to the dark brown prairie soil found in Asia, Europe and North America. The image of a tri-continental earth is obviously Bhatt's own metaphor for the worlds that nourish her talent. Each of her poems is evidence of a deeply cosmopolitan imagination, one well travelled and richly stocked with books, images, and learning, fearlessly sexual and intellectual, yet finally and altogether having her being in the immediate physical life:

I've fallen through the cracks of vocabulary lists.
Below all grammar rules. And then what?
Can there be anything without grammar?
Well, there are tomatoes growing everywhere.
My fingers smell of their leaves.