In his early years in Canada, he worked in a variety of summer jobs to pay his way through university, including as a tree-planter in the Canadian forests around Lake Superior, and lived in bush camps with Native Canadians and others, sometimes six weeks at a time--forming part of his drawing of imaginative connections between Guyana and Canada, both with large "unpeopled" hinterlands and surviving native peoples.
He received the City of Ottawa's first award for Writing and Publishing, and achieved a Certificate of Merit, Government of Canada (1988), for his contribution to the arts.
He is described as "a noted Canadian poet" and his work--"a great poem"--was read in Parliament (House of Commons, Ottawa, 24 April 2001, recorded in Hansard).
He has navigated a double career as a writer and educator combined with social justice, diversity and race relations issues in Canada (with the federal and municipal governments, travelling to more than 30 towns and cities advancing these issues); for a decade he managed a National Action Committee on Race Relations chaired at different times by the Mayors of Toronto, Regina, etc.
for the Federation of Canadian Municipalities in providing a national clearing house of information to tackle systemic issues, as well as coordinating an annual race relations award aimed at building social cohesion.
Under the university's Professional Services Program, he conducted diversity training seminars as a certified trainer to Federal Government personnel (e.g, Privy Council, National Defence, Stats.
He has done more than 300 public readings—including in about 40 colleges and universities—from his books across Canada, the US, UK and Europe (England, Denmark, Portugal, Netherlands, Austria), the Caribbean (Trinidad, Guadeloupe, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Cuba), and India (Delhi, Jaipur, Shimla);and about a dozen times at the National Library/Archives, Ottawa, and with UNESCO.
He has published and edited 20 books consisting of poetry, short stories, novels, and special anthologies on Asian and Black writing.
He edited four anthologies: Another Way to Dance: Asian-Canadian Poetry (Williams-Wallace); Another Way to Dance: Contemporary Asian Poetry in Canada and the US (TSAR Publications); A Shapely Fire: Changing the Literary Landscape (Mosaic Press); and Beyond Sangre Grande: Caribbean Writing Today (Mawenzi House/TSAR Publications).Co-edited with Anita Nahal, et al, Soul Spaces: Poems of Cities, Towns, and Villages (Authors Press, Delhi, 2023).
Critics have described him as: "a gifted Canadian poet" (Toronto Star); the "Pablo Neruda of Ottawa" (Patricia Morley, The Ottawa Citizen); "one of the most confident & accomplished voices of the Caribbean diaspora" (Kamau Brathwaite, New York University); "a fine craftsman and a wonderful weaver of images" (Kwame Dawes, World Literature Today, University of Oklahoma); "an amazing writer" (Douglas Glover); "like all your work--astute in politics and artful in poetics" (George Elliot Clarke, Parliamentary Poet Laureate); and that his reading style has "Stravinsky's rhythms" (The Ottawa Citizen).