THE FLAME
Reviewed By Patricia
Prime
*The Flame. Dr Stephen Gill, Vesta Publications,
Stephen Gill
is a multiple award-winning poet and is a well-established Indian poet (now
living in Canada) writing in well-established literary traditions, the latter
exploring experiences concerned less with his personal history than with world
peace, people’s suffering, brutality and terrorism.
In
his Áuthor’s Preface to The Flame, Stephen Gill writes:
The Flame is divided into eight
parts and sixty-two cantos. Part one of
The Flame is devotional. Parts two,
three, four and five are about the destruction caused by the maniac
messiahs. Part six is about those who
are responsible for destruction, and the remaining parts are about the yearning
for the loss. Some cantos are to extol
the virtues of the Flame, some are to portray despair, and some are in its
memory.” The last canto of the book
delivers hope. As the poet says, “Hope
signifies that a positive outcome is possible.
The
canto is a principal form of division in a long poem. The word comes from the Latin cantus, meaning “song.” Although these cantos are autobiographical in
inspiration they vary in the focus of their attention. They are the
self-communing of a man in later life, preoccupied with the grotesque pathos of
the human lot; but any tendency to self-pity is off-set by an agile prosodic
lilt and by a masterful use of his material.
The cantos are sustained without contrivance and never run out of
steam. They frequently draw parallels
between the contemplative immediacy of what it means to live in the modern
world and the truth as the poet sees it.
As against the intense psychological frame of the cantos there comes at
intervals a bitter yet sometimes humorous recollection of the poet’s
experiences. The contrast of cantos
where we witness the despair of individuals who have been mislead by those in
power, and those in which we witness hope for the future, is vast. As all good poetry does, that of Stephen Gill
directs one to the inexhaustible potential of human experience as a source of
imaginative enlargement, even when that experience is horrendous.
Part one of the cantos is devotional
and contains nine poems. Poem 1 alerts
one to a preoccupation not only with the Godhead but with the way prayer
enables one to overcome the greatest brutalities:
You are
nirvana that helps in
restraining
relentless brutalities
and manna for those who
hunger
for the morsels of equity
on the mountain of
intolerance
where
the biting winds blow.
Gill
explores the interplay between the poet’s own personal vision of God and his
attempts to relate what is perceived by his discerning eye to all of
humanity. These attempts are frequently
frustrated: in one of the more directly personal poems he says,
Tell me
how to string the harp
that is suffused with the
sounds
of your sprightly
prairies
and
receive the energy
from the symphony of the
earth
that is enveloped in the
virginity
of your blaze. (5)
The dissonance reflects the sense of
personal inadequacy. But such inward
struggle only rarely appears in a collection rich in scenes.
Gill is especially gifted at charting
what has gone awry with the world, as the following poem in Part two tells us:
I see
an abode of ghosts
looming in dismal dusk.
The crumble of steel
doors
besmear with red drops.
Pressed into a shaky
layer
of a massive cake
stuffed with metal, broken
furniture,
papers and boxes
its open walls
invite undeserved
destinies
to domicile here. (11)
An account of the terrible
destruction and human tragedy caused by bombs is recounted in poem 14:
Getting out of the car
a woman was burnt to
death
another,
blown backward
hit the car;
her arm and jaw were
broken
face swelled and turned
pale.
A man ahead
had his arms blown off.
In the context of the poet’s
memories it is not only the things seen that matter but their effect on people;
while at the same time Gill can lament the dulling of physical and nervous
response, as we are “pushed / into a grave of unfathomable horror / by the
avalanche of / the hate.”
Violence, destruction and death are
the components of Part three, but they exist primarily in relation to the
poem’s own responses and his relationship with the horrors he either witnesses
personally, sees on television or reads about.
The book amounts to a series of vignettes, often drawn with a delicate precision
of words, seen at its best in this most graphic description in poem 18:
Wearing thick overalls
and masks to ward off
the stench of decaying
flesh
gathering pieces of flesh
amid pools of blood
they walked in a
shattered shell
where hands, thumbs and
legs
littered
and blood stains were washed
by rains.
The unease inherent in this
devastating scene combines even with that of the animals who are witness to
events: “The perfidious conditions / stressed even dogs / who felt dispirited /
for not finding anyone alive.”
Describing
a forceful experience of innocent children playing unaware, as in poem 19, Part
four, Gill describes the horror of a bomb blast:
One was blown
to land on the street
more than half burnt.
After weeks in the
hospital
the infant returned home
with a tube to breathe.
For his grandmother
it was awakening
from a bad dream.
Here Gill works through images he
has deftly juxtaposed. These images evoke the world of innocent childhood with
its fleeting memories, against the background of cruelty, inhumane action and
cowardice.
The poems in this canto embody all
the qualities one most cherishes in Gill’s work, the engagement with
instability, the almost visionary sense of spirituality, an intensely personal
vision and a powerful emotional presence.
The poems present a simplified, pared-down version of his
socio-historical vision which is all the more powerful for its simplification
and which at times reads almost like nightmares:
They saw
babies wrapped
around the poles
or their faces blown off.
They saw mangled
carcasses
entombed under the beds
of steel
and a teacher
holding a child. (20)
This
is his most visionary, most nightmarish canto, the one where he reaches closest
to our empathy.
Part five tells how a camp was set
up for victims. Press reporters,
truckers, residents, counsellors and families join together to provide aid and
chaos reigns in the aftermath of disaster:
The area was cordoned off
most exit ramps were
closed
the telephone lines
jammed
the car agencies
had nothing to rent,
investigators and
relatives
filled the hotels. (23)
And tension rises between permanence
and change. The poetry arises from that tension, and it is not just the
contrast of people helping each other and the impermanence of human life and
activity, but the cold facts of human suffering that compel us to keep reading.
Part
six lays the blame firmly on those who are responsible for such terrible
actions:
I ask blood spillers
from the cabaret of
appalling barbarity
if they hear
the silence of infants
in the cradles of terror;
share
the woes of mothers
in the winter of their
lives; (26)
The
remaining cantos: seven and eight, are about the yearning for the loss of human
life. Poems 32 and 33 are written from a
personal viewpoint:
I cannot see
the burning bush of your
beauty
because terrorists have
loosened
suffocating gases
from the sea of their
insanity. (32)
And
I open eyes
from my deep meditation
at the wilderness of my
retreat
because I find you not
there. (33)
The visionary quality in these poems
is astonishing in its range, its depth, its complexity. The rootedness in
the local landscape is no limitation at all, its connectedness to history
through war, terror, destruction and human suffering, runs through these poems
as in 44:
The spark of my pen
that I have sanctified at
your altar
impregnates me with the
warmth
of your graceful
felicity.
Coloured with words
on the canvas of my wild
elation
I illustrate the rarest
excellence
of the matchless wine
on the lips of your
supernal nobility.
The
emotion becomes simpler and calmer in this canto; the poet’s feelings break
clear of the disintegration and are articulated as love, as in poem 50:
Easy calm descends
from the driving drifts
at the altar of
the deity of demands
where humans assert
their uncertainties.
But the pain is there in the love,
and the darkness, the overwhelming sense of darkness that pervades this whole
book. The poems can hardly contain the
breadth of vision Gill attempts to express.
Part
eight is a personal engagement with the Flame.
The canto is imbued with a sense of spirit and mystery, epitomised by
poem 57:
Resting on a rock
I hear
the surge of my guilt
from the murmurs that
haunt.
Bathed in the emerging
dawn
lightening flashes
among estranged clouds.
I see Moses appearing
from the disarrangement
of the void
while a deepening silence
knocks at the mobile
launchers
of my restlessness.
And despite this very personalised
relationship with the Flame, Gill’s main concern is to restore humanity to its
true autonomy, creativity and value, as we see in the final poem:
I shall pursue my odyssey
through the barren
regions of the moor
where the scamps of ego
erect deceitful caves
and reptiles of debasing
bargain ramble.
The radiation of their enticements
shall fail to lead me
into the blindness of
their hopeless
muddle.
In the end, I find the evidence of
this book pretty conclusive – one needs to reach beyond the confines of the conventional
poem in order to fully achieve the necessary imaginative vision to express the
nightmare of the world today, and to find those anchors and signposts to help
us navigate our way through.
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(*Patricia Prime from NewZealand is a prominent poet and critic)