The Flowers of Thirst: New and Old Love Poems

Laurence Steven is Chairman of the English Department at Laurentian
University and author of Dissociation and Wholeness in Patrick White’s
Fiction.

As stated in his introduction, Gill aims to show that all “normal”
people “under the sun” need love. He attempts to convey the
universality of love through various forms “to avoid the monotony”
and apologizes beforehand for his “humble” collection. His humility
is well founded; showing the universality of love seems to amount to
alluding to well-known images.

The first section, “Rainbow Breast,” portrays what love means to
Gill. He associates it with subjects such as beauty, nature, music, and
dreams. Images from these tried and true repositories recur in all
divisions of the book. In themselves these traditional subjects are not
a problem—Dante and Shakespeare got a lot of mileage out of them—but
in the hands of weaker writers the spectre of cliché looms large.
Gill’s section titles announce him as of the weaker tribe. Part 2,
“Haunting Melody,” relates the comfort derived from love.
“Blissful Wine,” the third section, reveals yet again what love
means to Gill. The second poem in Part 3 states: “Your eyes . . . a
lake where reigns the Olympian flames.” While most poems repeat the
same worn out images, number 13 paints an unattractive scene of the sun,
which “vomits its lava.” The last section, “Haiku,” contains
poems that are appropriate for greeting cards; in number 15 “Love is a
garden / where to grow / flowers fine and rare.” In number 10 Gill
admits he is “not a poet so killed.”

Since the titles are not printed above the poems, one constantly
returns to the table of contents. This is annoying and breaks the
rhythm. Titles would help distinguish the poems, which are too similar
in subject and tone. Apart from this irritant, the book is easy to
understand and appears to have been simple to compose. It is not
difficult to imagine why Gill is self-published.