THE KIMNAMA, By Kim Roberts. VRZHU Press, 2007. $12.00 (pa.) ISBN: 1430314079.

Editor of Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Kim Roberts has published widely, including a previous collection, The Wishbone Galaxy. Her writing has garnered her numerous grants and fellowships. With her newest book, The Kimnama, it is easy to see why.

Based on Roberts's experiences living in New Delhi, India, The Kimnama (literally: "The History of Kim") is a book-length poem that intersperses personal experience with history. The title and form of the book were inspired by memoirs (such as The Baburnama) of Mughal emperors. Roberts's rickshaw of words carries us through teeming streets redolent with "spices, wood smoke …sweat" past vendors selling everything from ice cream to chandeliers "hanging from a tree / so that the cut glass shimmered / where the sun / filtered through the dusty leaves."

Roberts filters her observations through Western experience. What would be out of the ordinary at home is ordinary here: the pungent smell of cow urine offered at a Gandhi memorial; buffalo dung shaped into patties, dried and decorated with "a swirl here, a herringbone there. / Art out of dung." Roberts's work calls to mind Whitman's "Song of Myself" in its expansive celebration of life in all its physicality. That Roberts infuses her work with humor makes it all the more engaging: "A Sikh man in a turban / tells me he looks like Clint Eastwood. / There is absolutely/ no resemblance."

Roberts remarks on colonial remnants--a shopping center built by the British with its formal white columns "overlaid with a mesh / of beggars, peddlers, autorickshaw drivers." Religious rites, both Hindi and Islamic, also capture her attention. "At the mosque at Mehrauli / women cannot enter. / They can peek through jali windows / covered with a carved stone fretwork." Roberts privileges us with a peek at a culture that in itself is a conglomerate of "15 major…languages and 13 are printed on each rupee." Although customs may vary ("a movement of the head…that looks like no to me / here means yes"), the currency of the human heart remains the same: when an old woman asks for money by rubbing her fingers together, "I reach for my wallet / she laughs and pushes it away. / What is she saying? / Mr. Singh translates / her Rajasthani for me: / she is teaching you / the word we use for friend."

"Where are you rushing good madam?" someone asks her as she strolls the streets. "He is right. / In India, as in nowhere else/ it becomes clear: / we are small and senseless, / turning in circles, our fate / in the hands of the gods." The reader is in good hands with Roberts's poetry. The Nahr-i-Behisht, the Stream of Paradise, used to flow through palace pavilions, "but now it's just a story, / a ravished story." Roberts's own story flows with ease and assurance. Her three line stanzas ripple across the page like the silk of "rainbow saris." Visiting the tomb of Muhammadpur she notes that the outer decorations have been stripped away, but "what remains / is pure structure, unimpeded / by ornamentation." The same might be said of The Kimnama.

At the end of her journey she is asked if she is going to describe her experiences with condemnation or praise. One of her friends says that it must be "masala, a little of both." Another offers this summation, with which Roberts closes her own engaging history: "You have to understand the human heart. / You can love many things; / one love / does not erase another."

-Reviewed by Kimberly L. Becker