SOURCE: Nabar, Vrinda. “The Old Playhouse and Other Poems.” In The Endless Female Hungers: A Study of Kamala Das, pp. 62-82. New Delhi, India: Sterling Publishers Private Limited, 1994.

In the following excerpt, Nabar provides extensive stylistic and thematic interpretations of Das's later poetry.

Kamala Das's third volume of verse, The Old Playhouse and Other Poems, appeared in 1973. It was published by Orient Longman and contains 33 poems, of which 14 had appeared in the first book and 6 in the second. This gives us only thirteen new poems in six years, a fact which speaks for itself.

Kohli has already listed the 20 poems which had appeared in the earlier volumes. They are “The Freaks”, “In Love”, “Love”, “Summer in Calcutta”, “An Introduction”, “The Wild Bougainvillea”, “My Grandmother's House”, “Forest Fire”, “A Relationship”, “The Snobs”, “Corridors”, “Loud Posters”, “I Shall Some Day”, “Drama” (all from Summer in Calcutta), and “Composition”, “The Suicide...