The Cardiologist's Daughter offers readers a mélange of
memories, retelling through poetry how the poet's mixed heritage (East Indian
and Dutch) fused into her unique identity-- as a naturopath daughter of an M.D.
father and R.N. mother. The strongest poems in this collection are about her
relationship with her father-- as the title suggests. But other poems about her
interest in science, growing up in the southern states of the United States,
and other relationships-- with teachers, friends, other relatives, nicely fill
out this collection.
The opening poem, The
Cardiologist's Daughter Returns Home, recounts her father's heart attack,
ending with these lines: "The bypass cannot/be bypassed and in
returning/life, there will be death and/with it, tissue upon/tissue
blooming/the rows as rose/a garden of flesh/raising a bed/of
stitches (11)." Later in the volume,
she recalls how, in Once, a father, the
crook of his arm, her father plays
with her after work: "After the heart patients clear, he swaps
stethoscope/for the necklace of his daughter, stocking legs/looping his throat,
as she, on his shoulders/steals second supper: curry potatoes,/basmati rice,
cucumber yogurt from his plate (27)." In How
We Sketch the Departed, a poem about the death of her Dutch grandfather who
" commanded thousands/of conifers for his Dutch nursery (47)", she
recounts first the death of a butterfly: "That night the butterfly
scorched /in the woodstove due to inattention, mine/and the butterfly's. Flame
sputtered as smoke/formed a pillow for the insect's final sleep--
black/smearing the azure that lined its wings (45)."
