It's true even I am you even the unbearable hell of this world is you: this being so what's the difference? One may go to paradise and reach perfect joy or go the other way and fall into hell yet I being I even when I remember I am you I still fear hell: lord in perpetual paradise let me be at your feet. (Part 3 of the cycle 'Waxing and Waning") There are poems spoken by the mother who doesn't know what to do with her daughter who has become infatuated with this most irresponsible of gods. And then there are the seven poems from the second composition, the Tiruviruttam, which are love-poems in the classical style. (This will be familiar to readers of The Interior Landscape.) Such poems are framed as dramatic monologues ('What She Said to her Girl-friend', "What He Said', etc.). A closely worked out system of formal imagery tells the reader whether the occasion is that of desertion, or waiting, or union, or whatever* For instance, scenes of lovers' meetings are signalled by the poem being set among (or referring to) mountains, night-time, the cold season. The imagery would include peacocks and parrots, jackfruit and bamboo. So 'infidelity' poems are associated with the countryside, the morning, any season, storks or herons, and buffaloes. There are five such "landscapes'. I imagine it works rather as references to the koel, or to the gathering of rain-clouds, gives clues to 76 July-September 1983