How easily he slips into a metaphor of music and love and how effortlessly does he carry it through. (That kind of confidence he did not have when he published his first poetry volume, Zones of Assault, 1991). The metaphor is sustained in the next lines - "Then scarf, sash, chemise: unpeeling all your skins/ you brace bare before the cheval glass." In the end the mirror and its ironic eye take over and the poem ends with the half line. "The echo is worse than mime." There is a hint somewhere that the lady is "snared" in the mirror (ego, sansaar, interpret it as you like) and a key line about "Tangled skeins/ of blood and lymph, ancestries, incests: / gifts of a brain on edge to a hinge that holds fast." And in this 14-line poem, "Speculum" (not one of his best) he has almost casually introduced the reader to determinism, and the lady to a genetically ordained destiny, with a hint of madness at the end of it.

His landscapes are of myth - "high priestesses, Aztec totems, altars that have sent up no smoke. In the "clogged clay" he finds old codes and "subterranean edicts." And from myth it is easy to slip into history - there's a Seleukos Niketor's monologue on Alexander. But myth is put to use, becomes a part of every day life. In this first poem - "Altamira" - a stone axe and a horned fleece hint at sacrifice. It is the way he hangs on to a metaphor, and the subtlety with which he does it, that draws my admiration (not to mention envy). The reference to the minotaur mask is, two stanzas later, followed by the "bellowing wind." No easy associations here - the labyrinth and all that baggage. Just the "spouts of fire that drive the bellowing wind mad," and the reader is left to make his own connections. From here he goes to the "bloodrush" of his beloved's hair, the blood image echoing his first stanza: "Morning wells like blood/ in the stag's hollow eye." Eventually this love poem ends with "the long ripple" of her spine. Fire, wind and beast-mask have given ample hints of the passion behind the love.

In "Night Shift" love gets intermeshed, not with beasts, but with talons and beaks:

All night, the whistling migration
of rumoured kestrels kept us awake:
we heard their wings beat close to our ears,
their beaks ripped cold meat such as appeared
as we undressed for a bed unmade
by bristling shadows and taloned fears.

Ranjit Hoskote has a way with words - "the raven is a black instinct," the lighthouse beams go "morse in the dark." Dejection is "a lath-and-plaster country slumped in eclipse." Grandmother is a "fever tree." A melting candle is shown thus: "A teardrop deposits its grief/ at the round foot of the flame." Of course the poet stumbles now and then, who wouldn't? In "Nocturne" we have the lines "your wordless breath/ fills my empty flesh with a flaming/ chorus of swords." A fine phrase, but what logic hyphenates two disparate like the beloved's breath and swords? Much more befuddling and scrambled are lines like "chimes carved from a clock/ with a cross for pendulum."

The dervish in the marketplace stops up his eyes
with coins. He dreams he is standing
neck-deep in water, when he howls
his words are an almanac of falling turrets,
suns breaking the contract
of their orbits...

He does seem to have gone over the top here, but then what would poetry be without liberties such as these?

Despite love being a presence, the air is melancholy in the earlier poems. Running aground is the equivalent of coming home. In the poem "Refugee" a "man of shadows taken off a galleon" is defined as "this widower of a kelp-strangled sea." But Hoskote opens up later. There are poems on paintings, including a long one on Ram Kumar. He talks of the "cannonfire blue" of a sky painted by Pussin. A poem, entitled "The Studio" starts with "this collage of troubled yesterdays", moves on to the tribal icons on the basalt altar and finally to "the unfinished painting" lost in "the nimbus of secrecy." Hoskote has after all written a biography of Jehangir Sabavala. Hoskote doesn't need a page to paint a landscape himself. Two lines will do. "Small Countries," dedicated to Maria van Daalen, starts with "You came from a flatland held in trust/ by dykes against a brooding sea." That says it all.

Which doesn't mean Hoskote can't be brutal. In "Headlines," a woman in a wheelchair thanks God she wasn't in the house when the bomb went off. "Parts of her face/ stare back at her from the row/ of shattered windowpanes."

Hoskote is fond of alliterations: "goldleaf glazes," "algorithms of arcades", "wick's womb," "muck-mottled." One may be completely off the mark, but both Borges and Dylan Thomas seem to have had a slight influence on his writing. As a result he is sometimes inaccessible. Perhaps this is because the language is pared to the bone. Or because these poems bear the watermark of fable: behind each cluster of images, a story; behind each story, a parable, I haven't read a better poetry volume in years.

The Sleepwalker's Archive, Ranjit Hoskote, Single File publications, Mumbai, p.152, Rs. 180.