NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

Ruth Leader's passion for the myths and legends of Thailand unites this collection. She invites us to travel with her on a magic carpet that's threaded through with peacock-coloured silk. These are finely spun poems born of loss - though not loss that invites our pity. Paradoxically each poem affirms the poet's retention of all that is Thai — they make real its flora and fauna, its culture, whose vocabulary, set like gem stones, is found within many of the poems. This from GRANDMOTHER'S TONGUE:

	As often as I can I take off my shoes
	and socks and wade
	through night water to dalaat
	where women beautifully
	fat
	as sleepy Rajasis
	fan hills of purple shrimp
	-paste and dark-red chillies
	like splintered rubies;

	We used to keep them on string,
	those beetles, you know,
	the rhinoceros ones with horns.
	We would feed them on sugar
	-cane and egg bananas (the ones they try to pass
	off in Waitrose as exotic)

	Take a walk
	through the streets
	of Bangkok behind the temple
	where Buddha sleeps and you will greet
	the flower market chalked with colour like neon
	bulbs celebrating the dark.  Buy an armload of jasmine,
	orchid, roses, birds

	of paradise and wander home,