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Murugan -- the younger son of Shiva and Parvathy, the younger brother of Ganesha -- is a tricky and temperamental god, but he is beloved of the poets. Fittingly then, Kala Krishnan Ramesh's contemporary bhakti poems in He Is Honey, Salt and the Most Perfect Grammar speak in the voices of many poets. We don't always know who they are, but as the poems unfold, one voice emerges above those of the rest. She is the god's favourite poet, a woman whose whole life revolves around him.

He is a god, an ideal, a magnet for the women who flock to him. They are scribes, editors, messengers, scholars. Some are warriors, some run households while others run kingdoms, and they are all involved in varying degrees with him, the god Murugan. They are desperately in love with him. He too is equally, hopelessly, in love with some of them. Between the lover and the beloved is a mutual give-and-take of flirtation, seduction, wooing, meeting, parting, pining and surrender. And always, a straining to get on with writing – a central motif in this collection of sharp-edged sutras and mellow poetry. A play of words and ideas united by the theme of longing and the articulation of that longing, this is an emotionally charged and deeply sensual collection of love poems.