Songs Before Shrine -2007
Stephen Gill
Authorpress, New Delhi-India
Pages 114 +xxii; ISBN: 81-7273-384-4

Stephen Gill is a multiple award-winning poet. His poetry is well-known in North America, India and Pakistan, and translated into other languages.
Reading Stephen’s Preface for Songs Before Shrine, we can fathom the depth of his traumatized soul. As a young man in India, he witnesses the carnage of human beings; man killing man in the name of religion. This was in 1947 when British India was being partitioned into two countries: India and Pakistan. This kind of bitterness and hatred aroused by bigotry and narrow-mindedness sickens the sensitivity of his soul. His repugnance for violence awakens his soul to enkindle peace and harmony among mankind, and he does that through his poetry.
Man has not yet found ways to bring in lasting peace and harmony to mankind as a whole. We rehash, at the present, the same old history of carnage and devastation in various corners of the world with much more vengeance than ever before; man, so far, has failed to see the futility of violence that he perpetrates to his own kind. In one of his poems Stephen’s soul aspires to flush out the satanic wrath of yore, and he chants an invocation in: Prayer for the Coming Year that his poetry be the voice for true lasting peace:

Strengthen my voice to weed out
the fear
the sickness
and the Satanic wrath of the past
and to help
truth to appear.

Stephen seeing the present travesty that goes in our times in the name of Peace cries out in The Dove of Peace:

For long time
I have been hearing
the dove of peace will be freed
shortly
and for that dove’s noble flight
a number of carnage waged
the delights of countless wives
subdued
numerous men
lost their sight
and many more maimed
lofty dreams crushed
the laps of mothers are empty now.

Stephen’s poetry emerges as a dialogue with the conscience of the world that we live in. In his poetry he endeavors to inspire mankind to build a new consciousness for peace by eschewing the frenzy of violence; and for that in his poem TO BE, he invokes the Muse to make him an instrument of peace:

The muse
that muscles the vision of poets
shape my pen into the plough
that will prepare my land for sowing peace
wherever its blade touches.

Stephen’s poetic aspiration is devoted to usher in peace and harmony, and almost all of his poems in this collection express that sentiment. He focuses his poetic vision to make us aware of the crimes that mankind is committing against humanity, often in the name of peace. In an in interview that Stephen Gill gave to Poetry in the Arts, Inc, (Texas, USA, Newsletter N0 23, January 2001) he puts it this way, “Violation is a disgusting aberration of beauty, and beauty is the music of creation.”

Lino Leitão is short story writer and author of Gift of the Holy Cross, a novel.