The Garden of Desire

The British poet Adela Florence (nee Cory) Nicolson, who wrote under the male pseudonym Laurence Hope and became known as Violet Nicholson, became a best-selling author in the early 1900s. She lived in India from 1881 and shared a love of native customs and food with her husband, Colonel Malcom Hassels Nicolson. She died by suicide in 1904 after battling depression all her life. Garden of Kama was published in Britain in 1901 and in America as India's Love Lyrics a year later. The original titles of some of the poems make it seem as though she was collecting the poems from locals rather than writing them herself (hence my choice of the word "pseudo- Indian"). "Kama" can be translated as "desire" and so I interpreted the poems through that lens, which pushed me into a strange spiritual landscape that was sometimes warm with hopeful innocence and cold with calculating jadedness. The unease of the global Coronavirus pandemic and the craven, cynical events in response to the 2020 US presidential election were on my mind and certainly colored my writing style here.