Ejaz Rahim, a major Pakistani English poet

Khurram Khiraam Siddiqui

Ejaz Rahim is a major Pakistani English poet with 30 books of English poems to his credit. He has taken Pakistani English poetry to new heights. The central theme in his poetry is love. Love for human beings, ordinary and common. He combines emotions with intellect in his poems.He is witty and incisive but never short of lyricism.
Prominent Pakistani and international critics have expressed their views about his poetry, some of which are given below.

Poetry from Rahim’s part of the world celebrates the reciprocity between God and man.Poetry from Rahim’s part of the world is infused with reverential quality; it speaks of awe and of God’s presence. Poetry from Rahim’s part of the world has a devotional quality in addition to its lyrical quality. Rahim’s poetry is no exception Professor Dr Lloyd Jacobs.

In his epic poem “Garden of Secrets, Revisited, Ejaz Rahim has consistently held that without acknowledging the divine existence and presence both in the universe and in human beings, all three- Universe Nature and Man will begin to pull in different directions and tear up the fabric of life. Without their convergence in a single spiritual stream envisaged by the Divine Creator, human self realization itself will run into the sands.
( Professor Fateh Muhammad Malik)
Ejaz Rahim’s poetry is word based and poem oriented which makes it biography of his inner self and also impersonal representation. He has used the word as the lever of release and has treated the poem as an evidence of his emancipation. This arrangement has led to the rich content of his life which lies hidden in the depth of the spirit and has only peripheral contact with the day-to-day living. In this sense his poetry stands for the valuation of a divided life where the two and against life systems interact to produce a pattern of meaning. This meaning makes Ejaz Rahim’s poems. ( Professor Gilani Kamran).
Ejaz Rahim is predominantly successful in providing us with genuine poetry which steers clear of the scylla of abstractionism and the Charybdis of naturalism and in his own words in an harmonious combination of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. (Professor Dr. Khwaja Masud)
Many of his poems have zeroed on this point which is a tiny fleeting moment of ‘silence’ between life and death turned static with a question mark.
( Dr. Wazir Agha)
The beauty of your poetry is there that it has described the great journey of life so artistically. It is for the first time that such a feet has been accomplished. ( Dr. Wazir Agha)
To conclude we can say that Ejaz Rahim is the finest English poet from Pakistan who is local as well as universal, witty as well as lyrical and equally alive to the national and international realities and has a simple way of expressing them.

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