LEAVES OF SILENCE reviewed by Princy Kumari and Professor Binod Mishra

 

Book Review: Princy Kumari, (Research Scholar) and Professor Binod Mishra, Department of HSS, Indian Institute of Technology,  Roorkee, Uttarkhand, India.

 

 

Singh, Ram Krishna. Leaves of Silence: Poems and Micropoems, New Delhi: Author’s Press, 2025. ISBN 978-93-6095-748-3

 

In a world driven by excessive reasoning amid the buzz of machines, men often long for some solitary moments where they can relapse into the years past and rejoice themselves with self-questions and responses. Our past experiences, interactions and inducements never fade but keep coagulating layer after layer. In this regard, Prof Ram Krishna Singh’s latest poetic volume enters into academia to unfold everyman’s premises, peregrinations and promises pellucidly. Leaves of Silence: Poems and Micropoems arrives as a late-style gathering, a capacious selection of poems and micro poems that consolidate the poet’s five-decade itinerary in Indian English verse. The volume explicitly positioned as a post-2024 catchment of work, includes short poems (haiku, senryu, tanka) alongside free-verse lyrics and brief sequences. The acknowledgement clarifies that most of these poems were composed after the 2024 collection Knocking Vistas and Other Poems, aimed at wresting meaning from a “depressing contemporary human condition and chaos” while searching “for sense in senselessness” and anchoring images “in nature and physicality with whispers of the soul.”

This biographical and aesthetic orientation is underscored by the concluding profile of poet-professor R. K. Singh, which places him amongst post-independence Indian English poets who negotiated “inherited tradition and global modernism,” but deviated from ornate or overtly declamatory verse toward “brevity, introspection, and a haunting honesty.” It also records his pioneering adaptation of Japanese forms to Indian contexts and the triadic force that animates his works – “sensuality, spiritual doubt, and existential tension.”

The content page announces an initial suite of 59 titled poems (from “Twin Flame” to “New Racism”), followed by three micro poetry sections – “Four-Liners,” “Haiku/Senryu,” and “Tanka”, and finally the author profile. This design highlights Singh’s signature range across long practised brevities and compact free verse, while also allowing the reader to experience a narrative unfurling; love and metaphysical ache echoing social and political fractures, before resolving into crystalline micro poems that chisel the book’s sensibility into lapidary flashes.

Singh’s avowed minimalism is not an austerity of feeling but a discipline of saying less to hold more. He insists that beneath the “brevity lies an intensity” (Singh 94) that “demands contemplation” (Singh 94) with haiku and tanka providing formal affordances for distilling “fleeting moments… of silence, sensuality, spiritual doubt, or existential tension” (Singh 94). The claim seems valid across the book; poems are short, stanzas spare; enjambments are functional rather than ornamental; diction remains colloquial but precise. Even the comic domestic space can bear existential heft. “Morning” (Singh 36) dramatises the quiet politics of space and intimacy - she reads, he sips tea, “nobody knows / what goes on inside”- until a maid’s request to “raise legs / for swiffering his space” cracks the scene’s surface and elicits a “stern look.” The poem’s humour and gentle sting convert a breakfast tableau into a study of classed bodies, territories, and unspoken marriages.

Singh has long been frank about the erotic, and here too he’s unafraid to scribble the same. If the erotic runs hot, loneliness is the counter-weather. “Solitude” (Singh 35) watches birds “collect on the railing” to “talk how the day went,” while the speaker “slouch[es] at the 6-inch screen,” cut off from daylight. The unobtrusive irony, birds enjoy face-to-face sociability, humans crave “fertile solitude” yet remain tethered to glass, captures a contemporary psychic split with a few deft images. Elsewhere, “Dull Notes” (Singh 37) converts the midlife inventory into an aesthetic project, “await re-ordering,” “shake the silent soul,” “create symphony / merging truth and dream”, so that music becomes a redemptive metaphor for late style making.

One of the volume’s most valuable arcs is its pivot from intimate micro-dramas to political conscience. “Heritage” (Singh 36) repudiates symbolic erasure, “Rechristened streets or cities / with Hindu names make no history / nor erase the Muslim past,” and insists that the nation’s “diversity of lived glory” cannot be erased by renaming campaigns. The lyric’s final turn, “memories may fade but won’t die / like I die every day yet live,” re-bridges polity and person. Later, in the fierce diptych of “Aching Defiance” (Singh 71) and “New Racism” (Singh 72), Singh tightens his gaze on inequality and sectarianism. The former builds a kinetic field of “floating clouds,” “sparrows,” and “life’s torrents,” then ends on a tableau of “armless bodies” that “rise / in aching defiance,” an image of dispossession transfigured into resistance. The latter sketches “Caste and religion / in food dress and colour – / glowing fault line,” a senryu-like precis of how identity is policed, then widens into a critique of “racist purity.” The final stanza, “god too is annoyed… their genitals stink with / dumb head and bruised grapefruits,” feints toward grotesque satire, scandalising any pious distance the reader might wish to maintain. The table of contents quietly flags other topical pieces, “General Election” (Singh 23), “Trump” (68), “Tariffs” (69), “Ceasefire” (70), suggesting a gallery of geopolitical touchpoints. Even without reproducing each poem, the list alone maps the breadth of Singh’s civic attention across domestic politics and planetary volatility.

The book’s final section is the professor–poet’s reputation for formally honed short verse comes full swing. The Four-Liners, Haiku/Senryu, and Tanka sections function like a triad of constraints through which the poet tests diurnals, memory, and erotic-spiritual restlessness. In the Haiku/Senryu sheaf, we move from urban wildlife, “two bulbuls / between hibiscus/weaving nest” (Singh 77), to kitchen slapstick, “a crow shits on the head: / cauliflower” (Singh 78), to “feeling caged / ghetto existence / craven paths.” (Singh 78), The sequence refuses a single register: always with the lightness of observation and a quick sting of insight, it can be comic, pastoral, and politically alert within a few dozen lines. The Tanka pages braid sensuousness with metaphysics, the earlier “libidinal no: / existential terror” (75) and “the door to heaven locked” (75) crystallize refusal and fear in compact, resonant images; later tankas turn to seasonal thresholds, “clouded sun at dusk/signs off the day’s chapter: / season’s first rain/hope for cactus too” (76), where meteorology becomes biography. If one asks what these short pieces do beyond the display of technique, the answer is coherence: the short forms refract the same triad: body, society, spirit, through extreme compression. They enact the book’s focus that the unsaid (white space, restraint, cut) can carry as much moral and emotional freight as discursiveness.

A recurrent feature of Leaves of Silence is its speaking voice, first-person but unsentimental, intimate but reserved. The collection also carries a mild dramaturgy of ageing and illness - “The doctor keeps vigil / the mind flutters / the heart needs care” (Singh 15), the speaker admits in “In Chain.” Yet rather than drift into elegy, Singh turns to fortitude: “I am I forever / in chain for salvation.” The stoicism is not denial; it is acceptance rendered without sermon.

Readers might be tempted to call the language “plain,” but the better adjective is exact. Singh frequently takes ordinary lexemes like milk, roti, kisses, tea, phone screens, brooms, and situates them extraordinarily. The lines are short; punctuation is spare; spacing works as tempo. This craft choice is not merely stylistic; it is ethical, too, refusing rhetorical insulation and insisting that feelings, politics, and metaphysics may be spoken in the idiom of everyday life. The result is a voice that can move, without strain, from “granddaughter” jokes to civic critique to eros. Even the punning and comic touches (a maid “swiffering his space,” a crow’s poorly timed sacrament) feel earned, because they arise from the grain of domestic time and the friction of shared living.

Singh's expansion of the usable edges of Indian English verse by adapting Japanese short forms is convincing. Short-form poetics in Indian English have often oscillated between epigram and imagism; Singh’s short poems recreate as instruments for ethical and erotic thinking, not just scenic notations. The bibliography presented in the profile of his earlier books makes visible a sustained practice across decades and across languages (including bilingual and translated volumes), which this book extends into the present.

Like every great poetic volume, Leaves of Silence too leaves some unevenness. Two gentle cautions might be offered. First, the occasional aphoristic pronouncement risks generality (“the world lives in us”), though Singh usually rescues these moments by returning to specific, felt images within the same poem. Second, some readers may find a few political pieces blunt in rhetoric (e.g., the grotesque satire at the end of “New Racism”). Yet even here one senses a deliberate worldly suffocation, an attempt to punctuate respectability amid the morass of prevailing indecencies in public sphere.

Leaves of Silence is a lucid, unguarded, and quietly daring book. It is daring not because it performs pyrotechnics but because it trusts the small: the small poem, the small scene, the small decision, the small mercy. In its pages, lovers conspire against time; seniors carry their medications into difficult mornings; a maid re-orders a room; a bird nestles into hibiscus; a country pulls at its scars; and words, pared to the bone, still find room for breath. If poetry is, finally, a way of paying alert attention, Ram Krishna Singh has offered a late-style ledger of such attention: to bodies and cities, to memories and meals, to headlines and heartbeats. In a season of noise, Leaves of Silence prompts readers to listen and introspect how our silences weave and retrieve songs that many of us often cast into oblivion.

 

Reviewers: Princy Kumari, (Research Scholar) and Professor Binod Mishra, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology,  Roorkee, Uttarkhand, India.