Publisher's Synopsis
This richly metaphoric and sensuous collection, the writer's third, achieves new levels of imaginative complexity in exploring such themes as the act of writing as a woman, of love and love denied, illness as a literal and metaphoric dimension of life, the Third World woman's experience of urban America and the problematic nature of identity for an Indo-Guyanese woman in exile.
Das's poems glitter with a gothic fascination with death. In 'For Maria de Borges' he is variously the death-broker who progressively strips the living of all possessions, the dark rider who 'rides, high black moon over all my dreams', but also the inverted source of life-energies ('into the real world I come/ with my muscles pumped/ so you may drain me'). In 'Sacrifice', death is 'Kathakali, blue queen/ black-nosed Mother of the Cosmos' who beckons and beckons to entrance the living to approach her, quick sword behind her back. In these poems, not to feel is the greatest ill and death is above all passionate.
These are poems that explore experience at the extremes, but throughout the collection the stripped bones sing their buoyant images of resurrection.
Mahadai Das was born in Guyana in 1954. She was a dancer, actress, teacher, beauty-queen and volunteer member of the Guyana National Service. She left Guyana to philosophy in the USA. Then came debilitating health problems. She died in 2003.
