India's Love Lyrics

About the book

Laurence Hope's poems return to love as devotion, separation, jealousy, memory, and the desire for an unattainable person. Their speakers move through imagined scenes of temples, gardens, journeys, and night landscapes, where color, scent, music, and heat intensify emotional experience. Refrains and songlike rhythms give many pieces an immediate musical quality, while the recurrence of loss makes pleasure seem precarious. Laurence Hope was the pen name of Adela Florence Nicolson, and these are her English poems rather than a transparent record of Indian voices. Reading them with that distinction in mind reveals both their dramatic power and their place within a British colonial imagination of India. The collection's emotional range emerges through its shifting speakers and repeated forms of yearning.

• Longing and loss
• Dramatic voices
• Colonial imagination

Why read it

Read it for the musical intensity of its love poetry and the questions raised by its imagined speakers.

English poems by Laurence Hope