Her poetry continues to be a source of deepening pleasure either upon frequent and extensive rereading or simple selective dipping and skimming. The palate is not jaded.

Kuldip Gill expects her readers to make it a duty to savour the world and its words. She crafts her poems accordingly. She does not shun the didactic and is devoted to the formalist play of movement. It is like the best Marilyn Hacker in its crispness and yet it is a different line of country that opens up. Hacker's New York-South of France axis offers different flavours. Gill brings to the table the riches of a British Columbia-India encounter. The rain and its results marks pages. Gill has a marvellous grasp of what consitutes not a resounding end but a resonating ending. Maybe it's the rain coast chronicling the lives of its migrants.

Take the portrait of "The Kashmiri Carpet Weaver's Son" whose lot it is to "pick/ and pick/ these colours, codes,/ these unmusical strings." Or give some attention to the sensuous cascade which concludes "Attar of Roses and Almonds -- Queensborough, 1940" and culminates in a most complex and intricate play upon the subtle ironies of the name of a school.

The second part of the collection consists of a set of elegant ghazals which extend the range of the rasa offered in the first section. Rasa theory in Sanskrit poetics describes an elaborate typology of nine essences or emotions ranging from eros (sringara) to the gruesome (bibhatsa), the heroic (vira), the timorous (bhayanka) and the comic (hasya). It will be a real treat if Gill explores the "more than thirty-one other subsidiary emotions (jubilation, dejection, agitation, debility, weariness, indolence, etc.)".

I, for one, would not weary of listening to her make the rain sing as a daughter attuned to stories of izzat and codes of honour, sing somewhere in an imaginative space between the memories of wartime Mission and the Kerala monsoons. "While Mama slipped hot almond/ skins between her fingers,/ then added cloves, light raisins" to "sweet saffron-steamed rice", sing as a woman poet watching for the telling silence as "Mama looked,/ rubbed her finger over/ the only plate with a cracked edge,/ said nothing." In wonder and in sorrow, the attention to detail is telling. In humour too.