Love Poems from a Frangipani Garden

In bringing Love Poems from a Frangipani Garden, which was written in English, before the public, I am motivated not by the sophistication of the poems but by the elemental forces and lingering fragrances which they attest. Yet 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 meeting ‘that other one / who may turn out lover or scorching sun’. But a love affair is not the only subject. True, ‘the body’s / sinuous trail of / rising desire’ runs through the book, with its garden in the city, like water. The poet seems to me to ask 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 the Tsunami, she memorialises her father when alive crossing the river into which she is scattering his ashes, she writes about the life-cycle of a traditional villager using water from a well, she visits with her lover 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 lovers may betray and the flowers of the garden be 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.