Stinking Rose

by Sujata Bhatt

The Stinking Rose is one of the names for a plant that arouses strong feelings: garlic. No one is neutral about it. Sujata Bhatt explores the various mythologies and the magical and practical aspects of garlic in a sequence of twenty-five parts, is also haunted by places, especially Vancouver Island (where the author lived and worked for six months), and by her native India. Europe is also present, a place of sometimes reluctant abode. There is a dialogue between new worlds and old, intensifying towards the end of the volume in a series of experimental poems, building on the experience of those celebrated earlier`bilingual' poems which bring Gujarati and English together.

115 pages, Paperback

First published February 23, 1995

About the author

Sujata Bhatt was born in Ahmedabad, India. She grew up in Pune (India) and in the United States. She received her MFA from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. To date, she has published six collections of poetry with Carcanet Press. She received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asia) and the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award for her first collection, Brunizem (1988). Subsequent collections include Monkey Shadows (PBS recommendation, 1991), The Stinking Rose (shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize, 1995), Point No Point (1997), Augatora (PBS Recommendation, 2000), and A Colour for Solitude (2002). She received a Cholmondeley Award in 1991 and the Italian Tratti Poetry Prize in 2000. She has translated Gujarati poetry into English for the Penguin Anthology of Contemporary Indian Women’s Poetry, and has translated poems by Gunter Grass and Gunter Kunert. Her translations from the German include Mickle Makes Muckle: poems, mini plays and short prose by Michael Augustin (Dedalus Press, 2007). She has been a Lansdowne Visiting Writer at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, a Visiting Fellow at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, and more recently was Poet-in-Residence at the Poetry Archive in London. Her work has been widely anthologised, broadcast on radio and television, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. Currently, Sujata Bhatt lives in Germany with her husband and daughter.