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SEARCH FOR ELYSIUM

Professor Dr. R.K. Singh

and Mitali De Sarkar

 

 

=======================================================================

SEARCH FOR ELYSIUM

=====================================================================

 

 

Like Shiv K. Kumar, Keki N. Daruwala and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Stephen Gill was born in Pakistan (Sialkot) and speaks Punjabi, Urdu and English, as well as some other languages. These poets stayed in different parts of India. Like several prominent authors, including Bharati Mukherjee, Uma Parameswaran and  Rohinton  Mistry,  Stephen  Gill migrated to Canada in search of better economic prospects, not knowing his step could ultimately turn out to be a struggle to discover his own identity.

 

Reading Gill's verses one finds he is his Indian self seeking a voice in a new land. His social norms, standards and values are neither fully Indian nor fully Western, but rather international. His concerns are human and his contexts increasingly become global. Perhaps his cross-cultural experiences enrich his creative sensibility even as he finds himself a foreigner in his adopted country and a stranger in his homeland.

 

Caught between two cultures, Indian and Canadian, he puts up with culture shock and adjustment conflicts, something every expatriate faces :

 

In the valley of terror

my bones crack,

shooting pains of insecurity,

while the pride of my ego

shamelessly mocks my nakedness.1

 

He feels like a "deer lost in the jungle" and expresses his dismay when he says Often I have to caress/even those thorns/which knowingly pierce/my feet.2

 

He tries to bring some disparate fragments of experience into significant wholes-- as every good poet does-- building meaning out of confusion. Ironically, he seems to challenge the mainstream Canadian poets who are sceptical about immigrant Canadian poets like him.

 

I wish I could capture you

in the rainbows of my pen, but

I am not a poet so skilled !3

Stephen Gill struggles for his identity in his country of adoption just as he looks to his old   country (India) for appreciation :

 

For you

often I have tried to write

but alas

many more wounds exist

than love's wound.4

 

Immigrant Psyche

Though Stephen Gill is not a Canadian by birth and his sensibility is essentially international, his works add to the ethnic pluralism of Canada. His poetry incorporates Indian consciousness that he offers from an international perspective when he says :

 

Thy land and life

and springs

thy summer and fall

and skies

and joyful birds--

delight-giving sights--

breathe a new life in me.5

 

Yet, reading his poems, novels  and  stories one experiences an immigrant-consciousness at work:  there is a conflict between his Indian ethos and the forces of marginal existence and nagging inconveniences in the country of his adoption. The poet evolves through raw socio-cultural pressure, barriers of race, religion, colour, and nationality making creative writing a survival process, a process of coping with the uncertainties of the new environment, new social structure, new values, new politics and new relations.

 

He suffers changes, swift and fundamental, shaking even the most basic human conditions; the complexity, diversity and rapid pace of change makes him appear a stranger in his own eyes, away from his own familiar society, often leaving him nostalgic. He voyages into the future, sometimes with an idealist tinge.  He copes with his   surroundings and probes aspects of Canadian life--sometimes as a mainstream Canadian and sometimes as an immigrant-- the two psyches ever active in his mind.

 

The conflict between his loyalty to the land he has come from and the new land-- his adoptive country, his willingness to accept the new geophysical setting and the resistance or unconcealed hostility of the host society leave an indelible impression in his thought process. The poet is ever indignant of "xenophobic" nationalists whom he calls "stinking vultures" that "rest in rusted tombs".6

 

Bewitched by the magic of Canada, the poet voyages to this new land, which was unknown, untravelled, unexploited and so intriguing in the beginning. It could possibly have provided a challenge, a new motivating force by which to live his life. But the unsettling experience of racial discrimination makes him feel uncomfortable.  Once again he assesses his status as a newcomer to Canada, as an individual, and as a human being, "caught at the honeycombed crossroads" of "divided humanity" , expressed in one of his trilliums : In the pots of patriotism/poisons are often prepared/to kill the lily of peace.7

 

His creative exercises reflect the adjustment pangs of an immigrant who has lived through and  survived  against  the  hostility  generated  mainly  out of the  uncosmopolitan  profile  of  his so-called  cosmopolitan  surroundings.  The range of emotions and sentiments experienced by Gill is common to most of the unfairly treated immigrants. The supercilious attitude of the mainstream citizens, hurtful insults and motivated racial assaults cripple them both physically and psychologically and, as a reaction to the feelings of hurt, they take recourse in voicing their protest through the medium of writing. He vehemently protests-- often with a touch of desolation-- against the demons of bigotries :"... life will not be the same/because the night of racial prejudice/chews peace/in the jaws of endless depth."8 This protest is more vivid in "An Immigrant Complains."9

 

Nostalgia

Since Gill did not live  his  formative  years  in Canada  nor  grow  up  in  its landscapes that could speak to him directly-- he migrated as a grown man-- he creates in terms of those cultural images with which he feels at home. The luxuriant new landscape of Canada makes him nostalgic about the villages and rivers he experienced as a child. There is a lurking feeling that he is not able to love the new country as he is not able to love his country of birth. This element of distance is always present both in his poetry and fiction. This is not necessarily a negative element but rather one of regret, because he seems to recognise the new environment as worthy of being his own, yet it is not. Hence the tension, a feeling of belonging and not belonging.

 

His sensibility is constantly in interaction with the new locale transmitting his experiences with the sort of creative tension every writer feels, articulating his or her inner growth. In fact, his becoming a Canadian citizen heightened his awareness of time and change: of the self isolated from others, of alienation, of the need to adapt to the present:

 

In a cabin of inaction

built with beams of silence

often I long to slumber

on a couch

with no flesh of worries.

For me

soft drops of harmony

shall produce a lullaby

from the notes of now.10

 

In  this, he is similar to several contemporary writers who blend their native tradition and the tradition of their country of adoption into a personal style and manner with all its awkwardness that includes trite imagery and expression, sentimentality, and  weak  emotional, verbal or technical interest.

 

Despite being in the process of adjustment with his surroundings, Gill demonstrates a sense of subtle nebulous links that are latent within; he expresses inarticulate feelings and unrealised emotions against a new perspective. We don't see a Canadian person in the interior mindscape of the poet, we see an Indian person ruminating over beliefs, customs, ideals and values that were his but are  now collapsing in the country of his adoption.

 

With the blurring of boundaries in the mental landscape that once surrounded his entire being, Gill is subjected to a nomadic subjectivity concerning his status in the new land. In this new setting  he  is  constantly  territorialised,  deterritorialised  and  reterritorialised,  creating  a gaping void of uncertainty that makes him nostalgic for his mother's warmth : I wish to breathe undisturbed/within  the walls  of  my womb...11

 

As   Parthasarathy  suggests, "exile",  self-imposed  or otherwise,  makes  one  learn  that  "roots  are  deep."   Stephen Gill is an illustration of the truth of this statement. It is perhaps his migration to Canada that explains his persistent obsession with the Indian past, both familial and racial, and it is this obsession that constitutes a major theme in all his poetry and is potently expressed in another trillium: A root unprotected/I need a wind/loving and kind.12

 

His  memories  of  the  moon  beams  of his homeland, absorbed through the eyes of a sensitive and  observant  boy,  create  an  immediate  need  of warmth in the dismal land he is inhabiting :

 

Move not away moon

your beams I need

for the dismal land.13

 

Gill's nostalgia  for  his  homeland  is  not  solely romantic, it is rather based on the harsh realities of life, as everyday life in this new land has its own measure of mystery and fear.  His poems reflect an ironic consciousness of the human loss and pain, a sense of disenchantment with spurious commercial prosperity and a feeling of despondency at the world-crisis towards which the society is heading.

 

 

Sociopolitical Awareness

Stephen Gill has taken writing  as  his  mission  or goal because his humanitarianism is seriously challenged  when  he sees  waste,  loss and mutual destruction again and again.   He stridently denounces forces that promote extreme and vicious nationalism or fundamentalism. He liberates his mind through his poems and reveals his sociopolitical concerns by exposing human animus that heighten existential agonies of modern life :

 

The land of devils is empty

because its occupants

extend desert of savagery14

 

Gill delineates a basic struggle of the soul, the mind, and the body to comprehend life in its totality; what he communicates through the poetic medium is a confrontation of his whole being with reality and his response to it in a pungent and straight-forward manner. The overall atmosphere created in the poems reflecting his sociopolitical awareness is one of gloom and despair with a degree of pronounced melancholia. Disappointment is the keynote of this melancholia, whether with edgy complications of social insecurity or with insoluble problems of political instability. The poet tries to convey his message by instilling a sense of mortal fear and by extending a sense of desperation into the sympathetic minds of his readers with the help of strong words and phrases of arresting alliteration and assonance. The expressions "murky marshes",  "ruthless locusts",  "fetters ... cranking', "vomit violence",  "ghosts of sorrow",  "gloom of violence", "dust of despicable horror", "self-surrounding cells of egoism', "spiteful robots", "suffocative islands"  etc. reveal a picture of devitalised society in the darkness of which the poet is jaded and lost.

 

He notices an unquenchable hunger for the manna whose source seems to have dried up suddenly because noxious germs of anarchy are let loose in the  sociopolitical stratosphere : A sense of uneasiness about our hastening confusedly towards unknown ends is all the poet can make out of modern society. Gill, therefore, finds nothing in which to rejoice. For example, on the eve of the New Year, which overwhelms him with a mood of gloom; he finds this day the same as the days of the previous week or "even last year".15 In the same poem, the poet ironically observes that If nights were replaced by days/just by thinking,/the corners of darkness/would have been lit by now./ Eaters of stale crumbs/in the mornings/should have been welcomed/by the appetizing smells/of fresh and warm foods./The hours of suffering/would have been reduced,/joys lasted longer/and lives changed. The poem, like a prism, reflects the unchanging social scene which is gnawed by hunger, death, sorrow and suffering, as ever, and life does not wear another mantle;/only calendars become new.

 

Using classical/religious allusions to fallen angels in the poem "Beelzebub of Demands",  Gill cleverly mocks the "seductive moans of social deities". Moral laxities, sexual indulgences, and political corruption and exploitation strike a staggering blow to the entire social system and the poet experiences an intense need to break the strings. He asks But how can I do it/when the Beelzebub of demands/chop off my wings.16

 

The poet believes that the channels of electronic media entertainment have added to the isolation of individuals, and people have increasingly become insensitive to simple pleasures like chatting over a cup of tea :

 

I wish to sit down

to talk and talk

and talk more

about this and that

over cups of tea.

But how and with whom

when all are hooked

to their own TV's.17

 

Sociopolitical upheavals causing loss of human values make Stephen Gill acutely conscious of the spiritual barrenness of the times. Gross human apathy towards the suffering of fellow-beings makes the poet question the forces of racism in his poem "To Humanists" :

 

Which humanity do you talk about ?

I saw her grisly dance

yesterday

at the railway station

where a handful of hooligans

scorned and hit a youth

of a different shade.

A wave of people rushed by,

either to catch a train

or to go home.18

 

Gill is more than pained to see that  "No soul had the time/or maybe the courage,/to let those fallen angels know/they have derided the Creator".18

His political poems reveal his anger at the foul play and sinister game of senseless vendetta played by  "discriminators"  who  crown  humanity  with  thorns  and  hang  it  on the cross of dreams. These "traders of dead bodies" squeeze the last vestige of blood from life and "in the grave of aspirations" of human helplessness "reptiles" find their "home". He sadly observes that the "paucity of bridges" between the "islands of tensions" thickens the  "darkness of doubts."19 Gill asks war mongers :

 

Is this

message of Christ

of saints and wise

to raze cottages

temples and churches

monuments and shrines...20

 

Anxieties related to war, terrorism, human  rights  violations,  religious  radicalism,  hunger,   racial  discrimination  and  ecological imbalances are some of the major issues that sit heavy on his conscience :

 

I asked my conscience

if it had perceived

in the eyes of humankind

the unshed tears

of hurts and humiliations.

A touch of scorn in its silence

nettled me to ask

if it had ever heard

the bricks of my cries

falling

on the blades of the environment.21

 

An overpowering panic in the poet's psyche caused by the ravages of war seems to be the extension of  his sociopolitical concerns.

 

War Consciousness

Humanity has witnessed  the naked  dance  of  death  in  the  form  of world wars; the worst spectacle was the use of atomic weapons during the Second World War. The poet is aware of savagery across the globe : "Humans look for an oasis/in human blood"22. However, the taste of blood was not enough for "war mongers". All the wars fought so far left the mute spectators of the whole world aghast at the large scale destruction caused by sophisticated techniques of massacre. Gill's  sensitivity  is aroused by these instances of ruthlessness.

 

The poet, a firm believer in democracy, decries war which disintegrates society and tears apart a country with all-round devastation: carnages waged,/the delights of countless wives/subdued;/numerous men/lost their sight:/and many more maimed./ Lofty dreams crushed./Laps of mothers are empty now./... Our homes now better adorned/with the thorns of hatred;/... man is to breathe his last/in the smoke." 23. War is self-defeating, it is fraud, declares Gill, and wonders  "What is today's man."  He can't understand the puzzle, the contradictions --- love for animals but hatred for humanity--perpetrated by the man of today.24 He pleads for love, harmony and peace, and knows  peace cannot swim/on the blood waves./ For a happier future/let us build bridges now 25 , killing the serpent within "that vomits the lava of hostility"26.

 

In poem after poem Gill points to the continually deepening tribulations of people everywhere-- contentions and disputes, mutual deceits, sudden calamities, misery and distress, the convulsions of war,  the spread of inveterate  diseases,  hunger  and  poverty, religious fundamentalism and fanaticism-- that have upset the world's equilibrium. To add to this, scientific advancement has made human being "a prisoner of chaotic nights." He develops the feelings of withdrawal from the world of violence and fanaticism in his poem "Me"27.  Increasing withdrawal from the world has inflamed a self-loving, shortsighted tendency, creating a globe where the only certainty is that nothing is certain. Upset over "pollution, panic, and poisonous civic life"  and prospects of a third world war, the poet seeks refuge in his own "calming womb/beyond the embraces of robots/and bursts of inhuman cries" that drives the dove of peace wild:

 

the urchins of stinking strife-

and dusty pride in the march

of technology and science.28

and

Science would write

the last chapter

and religious bigotry

shall provide the title

to the last dance on the hills

inhabited by the children

of racial insanity.

The clouds shall rage

to bear witness.29

 

He pities people who are proud of fiddling with noxious gases/and of raining/virus and fire/to deface our mother-earth but who are not proud of a single aircraft/accidentfree/to ensure our travels/carefree". 30

 

Gill  looks for poet-philosophers whose voice is "mightier than cannons" just as the promoter of universal brotherhood condemns the "fanatic mind" which is born of ignorance and is "death's cradle".31 In his disappointment, Gill, seeker of the global peace, prays to God : Give us wisdom/not to uproot our orchard./The earth./Thy footstool,/enlivens all/o Lord/.... /Give us now/a gown of humility/to wear/water of tranquillity/to drink/..32

 

The seeker in him considers war, for whatever reason--political, economic, racial, ethnic, religious-- a derision of the Creator,  who  cares  for  everyone  and  reveals the secret of undisturbed peace. Since "the worship of violence ... leads to the temple of hatred," he urges people and governments not to rest on their political power, economic strength or armies but to follow the path of justice and promote the highest interests of the whole of humanity.

 

A Search For Elysium

Gill turns to poetry to search for unity in the multiplicity of cultural norms. He tries to assimilate cultural diversity to explore himself and discover his own creative tissues:

 

The womb of life

fabric of civilizations

author of prosperities

mirror of wisdom

sonata of Peace.33

 

For him genuine poetry is an antidote to suffering, which he can transform "into nutrients" with divine grace. As he prays: "Display in them/Your will;/fuse them with Your beauty".34 The poet has a strong faith in poetry :

 

I wish my poetry to be friendly

to pacify the tiger of violence

and to assemble flowers of all hues

into a single bouquet.35

 

As a potent voice of humanity, he warns his readers about the looming disaster which will befall humankind if the present generation does not take concrete measures to maintain world peace and harmony. He believes that Humans have to change/demons to go, and/rusted fetters to break/before the glory of harmony/stretches soothing wings/over the decaying orchards,..36

 

The poet looks for the ambrosia that can instill corpuscles of  love and tolerance into the masses whose leadership indulges in internecine struggles. His poetic cult is the cult of humanity which reverberates with universal love, manifesting itself in the form of devotion through self-abandoning supplication, through love for nature, through love for the beloved, and through commitment to peace and harmony.

 

Gill's poetry is, in fact,  an embodiment of philosophy as much based in Hindu metaphysics

as it is founded on Christian faith. The poems echo oriental philosophy in that they make the readers turn inward in search of the meaning of existence. It's only through knowing one's own self one can understand the outer world and the society at large :

 

It was on the crossroad of desires

where I met Me.

Looking into my eyes,

He shook my hand at that cold moment

and then dissolved slowly

like evening

in a crowd of strange faces.

In his silent sight

I perceived a glow

despair

and the joy of flying birds.

Under the brow of cloudy skies

those deep eyes

dropped the dew of innocence

on the wings of my guilt

which I carry still

while searching for Me.37

 

Christianity propagates love for humankind through broadening one's outlook and realising the presence of God in one's being. In search of love one need not look outside because it lies in abundance hidden in one's own self. The presence of this divine love should be realised through cultivating a harmonious feeling for fellow beings. In one of his poems he says:

 

I live in your veins

your blood is my abode

I am the love,

search your heart.38

 

Sometimes his poems sound like the sacred utterances of a devotee madly in love with his goddess in the tradition of Mirabai and Jaidev : "Your smiles emitted might/the blue eyes gave sign/I called you shrine"... 39

 

His love for the beloved and Nature often swap places. Whenever in dismay, he longs to see her face:

 

A melody

that I die to hear

from my window of dismay

when down goes the sun

is your face.40

 

For him the moon, dew, flame, rain, rainbow, etc. are life-giving sources, the blessed and positive aspects of life that carry cells of love in their veins, i.e  the "elysian charm" or "God's wonder." He wants to submit himself to this eternal source of joy. In fact he wants his love to culminate in joy. Even in the face of unhappiness, cruelty and disillusionment, the poet in Gill wants to be rejuvenated by the grace of love, which he seeks "not in dreams/and the thoughts in solitude" but "along the serene self-composed clouds".41 Some of his poems smack of several classical Indian poets who metaphorically compared their lady-love with the 'mountains', 'buds', 'seas' and 'sun's rays' or as distraught lovers moan:

 

Abandoning all,

I longed to kiss

your lips;

frozen indifferent

they kept me afar.42

 

Stephen Gill seeks to realise his love in "a sinking star of the morning" even as his lady love might not bear the "majesty of oceans" or "the secret of fragrance,"  or "the pride of youth" or "the beauty of the moon." Aware  of  the  fleeting  nature  of  time as he is,  Gill  faces  the  reality of  life  and death,  hope and dismay, gain and loss with a sense of equanimity:  "Under the ashes of the last night/half-dead embers glow again/while thieving time passes by."43

 

The poet dreams a life that, against all odds and limitations, shall give him all he desires. The "Elysian gleams" or the "Elysian charm" he looks for in his experiences are in fact indicative of an attitude, which is positive, constructive, and humane, with an understanding of the discordant reality of life, especially greed, hunger, pollution, and war. He seeks to live in the "dignity of hills/vision of heaven"44 to counter his aloneness.  As he imagines romantically :

 

I shall build a cabin there

with the stuff simple

sleep there as I wish

awake to music serene

attuned one with nature.

I shall hibernate somewhere

in a lonely, unvisited spot

amidst the Elysian bounties

embracing peace surpassing all.45

 

The  idealist  in  Gill expresses a longing for the Elysian fields free from social, political, territorial, moral, ethnic and ecological pollution. He dreams of a world where people would harmoniously co-exist forgetting petty discrimination on the basis of caste, race, colour or nationality  and would love each other accepting individual differences. This love would metamorphose humans by healing and bestowing upon them the power to heal. Professor Dr. Frank M. Tierney, supports this view when he says:

 

"But there is in Tennyson's poems and Mr. Gill's volume a hierarchy of values. The first and most important is, as John Henry Newman insisted, `growth from within.'  This growth requires spiritual priority. This principle leads man to personal, national and international harmony through an understanding that comes from love".46

 

In one of his letters  to  the  editor, Stephen Gill confirms this view : "I believe in the Being who is all-love, nothing but unconditional love. Realization of this type of love opens doors to the fount of tolerance of the views and practices of others, and ought to dispel the clouds of terror which hide the sun of peace."47

 

Conclusion

Gill's  poetry  testifies  to  his  inner  need  to  live  more  deeply  with greater awareness, to know other's experience and to know his own experience well. He recreates situations and experiences that are significant and focused to derive a better understanding of the contemporary world. He broadens and deepens experiences, using language as an instrument of persuasion and as an aid to living in a world which is self-destructive. His purpose is to arouse and awake, to shock one into life, to make one more alert and responsive to the happenings around, to make one more alive.

 

Stephen Gill is a poet of values-- universal peace and love, oneness and wholeness of the human race, respect for human rights, and a social structure designed to produce and promote justice. The poet, who considers his poems part of his spiritual self, urges abolition of racial, religious, political and economic prejudices and seeks equal opportunities and privileges for men and women, adoption of a world code of human rights and responsibilities, and creation of a world federal government to heal the dissensions that divide people. He knows religious fanaticism and hatred are a world-devouring fire whose violence none can quench. God alone can deliver humanity from this desolating affliction. Gill's principal concern is to rescue the ignorant or fallen people from the slough of impending extinction. Features like post-modernist self-understanding, sense of doubt, despair, uncertainty, futility, rejection of European/American dominance and assertion of individuality are some of the hallmarks of his creativity. Dr. Rochelle L. Holt, an eminent American poet, put it in this way: "Yes, love is the answer to the questions-- why no peace? It's as simple as that, but Confucius say : `Simplicity is the last thing learned. It comes from simple thinking, not from the conscious attempt to be simple."48

 

As an ethnic writer and poet, Stephen Gill enriches the mosaic-tapestry of Canadian culture and values with his Indian background and Asian learning. The immigrant sensibility of the novelist Gill extends into the poet Gill, whose creative negotiation absorbs the conflict of cultures without being bitter: A crusading idealism overwhelms him with the emotions of love and tolerance just as his missionary zeal is a reflection of the utopian state he fervently desires to achieve through aesthetic endeavour. The poet strives to make "society more rational and more friendly" to promote brotherhood; he loves the world and dedicates himself to the service of the entire human race.

 

FOOTNOTES

 

1 Gill, Stephen. "Blind and Deaf" Gypsy 17, 1991. p.62

2 ---------------. "A New Canadian in Toronto," Star India, July 9,  1993, p.15.

3 --------------.The Flowers of Thirst. Vesta, Canada, 1990, p. 88.

4 Gill, Ibid., p. 84.

5Gill, Stephen.  The Dove of Peace. 2nd Ed. New York, USA, MFA Press, 1993, p. 27.

6 Gill, Stephen. Songs For Harmony. New Jersey (USA), Rose Shell Press, 1993, p. 13

7Gill. Ibid., 55.

8Gill. Ibid. 48.

9Gill. "An Immigrant Complains", al-mohajer, issue 1, Jan. 1994.

10Gill. Songs for Harmony. p. 19.

11Gill. The Dove of Peace. p.48.

12Gill. The Flowers of Thirst. p.96.

13Gill. The Dove of Peace. p. 37

14Gill. Divergent Shades. Writers Forum, Ranchi, India, 1995, p. 47.

15Gill. "On the New Year," Seaway News, Dec. 28. 1994. p.2

16Gill.  "Beelzebub of Demands,"  From Both Sides of the Ocean,  January-February, 1995, p.23.

17Gill. Ibid. p.23.

18Gill. "To Humanists,"  Al-Mohajer, Issue 2-3, Feb.- March 1994.

19Gill. "Divided Humanity," From Both Sides of the Ocean, Jan/Feb. 1995, p. 11.

20Gill. "War-Mongers," Nirankari, Feb. 1996, p.16.

21Gill.  "A Conversation,"  Conscience Canada, No. 60, Winter, 1994

22Gill, Stephen. Divergent Shades, p. 47

 

23Gill. The Dove of Peace,  pp. 13-14

24Gill. Ibid. pp. 18-19

25Gill. Ibid. pp. 22-23

26Gill. Ibid. p.37.

27Gill. "Me", Des Pardes, Fall 1993, vol 5, No. 5.

28Gill. The Dove of Peace. p. 48.

29Gill. "Last Dance", Twilight Ending, vol.2, May 1996, p. 21.

30Gill. The Dove of Peace. p. 15.

31Gill. The Dove of Peace. pp. 49-50

32Gill. The Dove of Peace. pp.52-53

33Gill. Songs For Harmony. p.27.

34Gill. Songs For Harmony. p.9.

35Gill. Songs For Harmony. pp. 11-12.

36Gill. Songs For Harmony. p. 27

37Gill. "A Handshake", Graffiti Fish, Carleton University,

Vol. 2, No.1,  Ottawa (Canada), 1995, p. 21.

38Gill.  The Flowers of Thirst. p. 16.

39Gill.  The Flowers of Thirst. p. 38.

40Gill.  The Flowers of Thirst. p. 20.

41Gill.  The Flowers of Thirst. p. 56.

42Gill.  The Flowers of Thirst. p. 24.

43Gill.  The Flowers of Thirst. p. 23.

44Gill.  The Flowers of Thirst. p. 24.

45Gill. The Dove of Peace. p. 44.

46Tierney, Prof. Dr. Frank. "Reflections of An Indian

Poet",  Canadian India Times, Nov. 15, 1973, p.5

47Gill. "Love and Only Love Will Stop the Bloodshed," Daily Standard-Freeholder, Aug. 5, 1994, p.4.

48Holt, Rochelle. "A Call For Love", The Pilot, USA, June 20, 1992.

 

 

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

BOOKS :

 

*Who's Who in The Commonwealth, International Biographical Centre, Cambridge, England;

181-glimpses

 

*Immigrants We Read About by George Bonavia, International Production, Ottawa ;

 

*Who's Who In Canadian Literature, Reference Press, Toronto, Canada

 

*Ethnic & Native Canadian Literature : A Bibliography by John Miska, University of Toronto Press ;

 

*Something About The Author, vol. 63,  Gale Research, USA;

 

* Hines,George, Ph.D. Stephen Gill & His Works (an evaluation). Introduction by Dr. John Robbins,  former Ambassador to the Vatican, and President of Brandon  University,  Vesta, 1982

 

ARTICLES:

 

-Drake, Bobbie. "Flowers of Thirst", INDIA GLOBE, June 20, 1992

 

-Gamble, Rick.  "Literature Said Vital Force For World Peace", THE EXPOSITOR, Sept. 8, 1976

 

-Gaur, June. "Beyond Personal History: Zulfikar Ghose's Confessions of A Native Alien", THE LITERARY CRITERIONS. vol XXX1, N0.l & 2, 1996, page 64.

 

-Heward, Burt. "Newcomer to Canada," CITIZEN, Apr. 12, 1977, p.37

 

-Holt, Dr. Rochelle L. "Dove of Peace As a Call For Peace," THE PILOT, Jan. 20, 1992

 

-Koch, Terry. "Ideas Don't Report To Customs", AT YOUR LEISURE, Apr. 9, 1978

 

-Marshall, Valerie. "Writing Time Important For Local Writer- Poet, STANDARD-FREEHOLDER,

 

-Nahal, Chaman. The New Literatures in English. New Delhi : Allied Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1985.

 

-Parthasarathy, R. Rough Passage. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1977, page 17.

 

-Penny, Margaret. "Time is True Test For Writer's Ability", STANDARD-FREEHOLDER, Oct. 19, 1976

 

-Parakot, Manjula. "Interesting Indians", THE CANADIAN INDIA TIMES, Nov. 18, 1976, p.9

 

-Shukla, Rajesh. "Peace & Understanding In Gill's Reflections & Wounds", CHRISTIAN MONITOR, Oct. 2,    1981, pages 6-7

 

-Singh, Pritam. "Little Punjab in Canada--Stephen Gill", ADVANCE, June 1990, p.14

 

-Tierney, Professor Dr. Frank. "Reflections of An Indian Poet", CANADIAN INDIA TIMES, Nov. 15, 1973, p.5

 

 

First published in  The Mawaheb International (Canada),

June 1998

About the Author

Dr R.K.Singh teaches English language skills to UG and PG students of earth and mineral sciences besides practising poetry, especially haiku and tanka. He has published 35 books, including 14 collections of poetry.