Isha Singh's Bookshelf
Drifty Silence and She: Selected Poems & Micropoems
Ram Krishna Singh
Edizioni Universum, Italy
9791282016278, $TBA
Amazon
https://www.amazon.it/Drifty-silence-Selected-poems-micropoems/dp/B0G4SKM2N7
Ram Krishna Singh's Drifty Silence and She is distinguished by its
minimalist aesthetics which engages with the existential predicaments of
modern life. Published by Edizioni Universum in November 2025, it
comprises 52 titled poems, 10 four-line micropoems, 54 haiku, and 55
tanka, totaling over 200 discrete poetic utterances. The volume is
dedicated to the memory of Italian educator and poet Renza Agnelli
(1951-2025). Her posthumous poem 'No One Should Be Left Behind' serves
as an ethical touchstone for the collection.
The collection continues to explore the themes of his earlier works,
such as Against the Waves (2021), Poems and Micropoems (2023), and
Knocking Vistas and Other Poems (2024). However, this volume stands out
for its distinctive synthesis of form and content. An imagistic
technique of Japanese poetic forms converges with deeply personal
meditations on aging, desire, spiritual uncertainty, and socio-political
disillusionment. The structural organization of the collection falls
into clearly demarcated sections, creating what might be termed a
"poetics of gradation": from the relatively expansive titled poems
through the compressed micropoems to the ultra-condensed haiku and tanka
forms.
Thematic Architecture and Conceptual Unity
The thematic coherence of Drifty Silence and She emerges from its unique
dialogism. Mikhail Bakhtin"s concept of dialogism is an internal
dialogue between impulses: the longing for transcendence and the pull of
corporeal existence, the desire for connection and the reality of
isolation, along with the search for meaning and the confrontation with
absurdity. This dialogic tension exists across the entire collection,
creating what Bakhtin would recognize as a 'polyphonic structure'.
Multiple voices and perspectives coexist without final synthesis.
The opening poem, 'Twin Flame,' establishes a connection with severance.
This is done by introducing the metaphysical conceit of souls as that
'were one once' now seeking reunion, "despite havens of hate / media
carnage." This reveals Singh's method through the juxtaposition of
personal yearning against the backdrop of contemporary chaos. The poem's
final image of 'pairs becoming whole' offers a provisional hope that
subsequent poems will repeatedly interrogate and complicate.
Three dominant thematic clusters organize the collection's concerns: the
metaphysical and spiritual, the erotic and corporeal, and the
socio-political. These categories interpenetrate in ways that recall
T.S. Eliot's concept of the 'unified sensibility,' wherein thought and
feeling, intellect and sensation, remain fused rather than dissociated.
In 'In Chain,' for instance, the speaker's body becomes simultaneously
"my prison" and the site of spiritual aspiration, unable to "escape its
dictates / and fly to divine." This poem exemplifies what we might term
Singh's 'somatics of the sacred', wherein the body is a paradoxical
ground of both limitation and possibility.
The erotic dimension of Singh's poetry has frank engagement with
sexuality in aging bodies. Poems such as 'Sleep Divorce,' 'Freaky
Bodies,' and 'Body's No Picnic' confront the deterioration of marital
intimacy. These add value with an honesty that eschews sentimentality
and cynicism. The poem 'Sleep Divorce' opens with the stark declaration
that "She shuns the normal, the erotic." Then it proceeds to catalog the
physical and emotional distance between partners who now occupy
separate rooms. The wife, "withdrawn to mobile listening to / old songs
on YouTube not answering / my distress call sleeping or awake," becomes
an emblem of contemporary isolation. The poem's closing line, "I breathe
longings shuffle eerie hours," captures the speaker's liminal
existence. Singh's poems resist what we might call the 'desexualization
imperative' applied to aging bodies, insisting instead on the
persistence of erotic longing even as bodies fail. In 'Body's No
Picnic,' the speaker acknowledges the wife's legitimate grievances ("she
blames me for changing size / shifting shape and cracking bones"). The
speaker affirms a stubborn love: "I love you as you are / let's carry no
useless weight."
The socio-political dimension of the book emerges most forcefully in
poems such as 'General Election', 'Abandoned,' 'Systemic Romance,'
'Absurd Maze,' 'Freedom,' and 'New Racism,' which engage contemporary
Indian politics with a sardonic eye. The poems critique what Singh
perceives as the commodification of democracy and the rise of communal
antagonism. 'General Election' employs the trope of repetition to
suggest political stasis. For example, "voting the same prophets /
attired differently / aspiring the same throne / proclaiming the same
faith." The poem's sardonic tone intensifies in its characterization of
political revelations that "desecrate democracy." It positions
politicians as false prophets who "sit over with black guards / vying to
excel the others."
A more provocative take is 'Systemic Romance,' which explicitly names
the "Trump-Modi era" as inimical to "sublime," associating both leaders
with a politics of "divide and rule through / trade war and extremism."
The poem's speaker positions himself in opposition to nationalist
rhetoric: "I don't share their tangerine / nor stream in their landscape
/ even if I'm consumed / in the bleakness of fire or flood." Here we
might invoke postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha's concept of the
'unhomely' to describe the speaker's alienation from dominant
nationalist narratives. The speaker occupies a position of internal
exile. Physically he is present within the nation-space but psychically
he is estranged from its governing ideologies.
The idea of 'New Racism' identifies caste and religion as fault lines
that "sustain leaders and uphold / nation's after-image." The poem's
bitter conclusion speaks in the lines, "god too is annoyed / to see
design gaps in / bipeds delivered: / their genitals stink with / dumb
head and bruised grapefruits." This employs scatological imagery to
deflate human pretension and divine authority. This move recalls
Bakhtinian carnivalesque, where the sacred is brought low through bodily
imagery. Although Singh's deployment of such imagery lacks carnival's
celebratory dimension, it veers instead toward the scabrous and
misanthropic.
Poetic Technique and Formal Innovation
The formal achievement of Drifty Silence and She lies in Singh's adroit
manipulation of line, breath and image across multiple poetic modes. The
collection moves from longer poems through micropoems to haiku and
tanka. This enacts a progressive condensation that mirrors the
collection's thematic concern with silenced unsayable. One might
understand this trajectory through the lens of Russian Formalism,
particularly Viktor Shklovsky's concept of defamiliarization
(ostranenie). Moreover, he is presenting similar thematic materials
across radically different formal constraints. Singh 'makes strange'
both the subject matter and our habitual modes of reading. He is
compelling fresh attention to the relationship between form and content.
The titled poems exhibit a formal variety, ranging from free verse to
quasi-syllabic patterns. 'Know and Move' exemplifies Singh's method of
accumulation and assertion. Hence, building toward its gnomic
conclusion: "taste the rage / know and move / the destination waits."
The poem employs a catalog structure which lists abstractions ("quest
courage love / hope faith beauty / nature universe god") that are
declared "all fused within us." This technique recalls Walt Whitman's
enumerative poetics, though Singh's catalogs tend toward the
philosophical rather than the sensory. His tone lacks Whitman's
exuberance, substituting instead a weary stoicism.
The enjambment in the poet's longer poems frequently produces semantic
ambiguity. As a line breaks, it isolates syntactic units in ways that
generate multiple possible readings. Consider the opening of 'I'm a
Poet': "I appear vague to seekers of sublime / curate moments of
mind-body dissonance / that's why I'm a poet." The phrase "seekers of
sublime" resonates with Longinus's concept of the sublime as that which
elevates and transports. But Singh positions himself as appearing
'vague' to such seekers. The verb "curate" introduces an interesting
tension. It suggests deliberate selection and arrangement (as in a
museum). Implying artistry, yet the object curated is "moments of
mind-body dissonance." This suggests fragmentation rather than
wholeness. This self-definition continues through anaphoric repetition
("that's why I'm a poet"), building an ars poetica that celebrates the
poet as one who "merge[s] truth and dream with psychic echoes / put[s]
things together in ways no one does."
The haiku section represents Singh's most interesting engagement with a
non-Western poetic form. These poems demonstrate fidelity to haiku's
figurative compression and willingness to adapt the form to Indian
contexts/concerns. Classical haiku (as theorized by critics such as
Makoto Ueda) typically presents a moment of natural observation that
implies rather than states emotional or philosophical significance.
Singh's haiku often preserve this structure while also expanding its
thematic range. Consider: "too many gods / and so few flowers / whom to
please?" This haiku employs the tripartite structure characteristic of
the form. Additionally, it introduces a note of religious satire which
is often absent in traditional Japanese examples. While the
juxtaposition of abundant gods and scarce flowers implies the
proliferation of deities in Hindu worship and the inadequacy of
devotional offerings, the final question introduces an ironic tone
foreign to haiku's customary objectivity.
Other haiku in the collection demonstrate the poet's facility with
juxtaposition and imagistic precision: "full moon / a frozen dot- / deaf
beyond." Here the cosmic (moon) and the sensory (frozen, deaf)
interpenetrate in ways that speaks for the speaker's alienation from
natural beauty and the universe's indifference to human observation. The
image of the moon as 'frozen dot' performs a literalizing reduction and
'deaf beyond' introduces synesthetic confusion (deafness applied to
vision) that mirrors the speaker's experiential disorientation.
The erotic haiku merits for their frank sensualism: "her lips / crimson
with paan / stings my heart" transforms the traditional haiku nature
image into bodily intimacy. The betel-stained lips become a visual image
and metonymy for desire. 'Stings' introduces the paradox of pleasurable
pain characteristic of erotic longing. This poem exemplifies what we
might call Singh's 'erotics of the everyday', wherein mundane details
(betel-chewing) become charged with sexual significance through the
lover's gaze.
The tanka section extends the haiku's imagistic method across the
five-line, 31-syllable (in Japanese) form. Singh's tanka employ
narrative or dramatic elements foreclosed by haiku's brevity. "On the
roof top / she waits for her man with / moon cake and lantern: / a flash
of silver showers / on the mist-shrouded figure" constructs a scene of
romantic anticipation. This is complete with atmospheric detail (mist,
silver light) and the lover's iconic attributes (moon cake, lantern).
The poem gestures toward Chinese and Japanese literary traditions while
remaining rooted in contemporary experience, and thus, creating what one
might term as 'transcultural poetics.'
Singh's deployment of poetic devices across these varied forms
demonstrates a considerable technical range. Metaphor and simile appear
throughout, though often in compressed, algebraic forms. In 'Casual
Miracles,' for example, the comparison "like a brief smile / casually
exchanged / stirs life long love / or a flap of / butterfly's wing /
triggers tornado" employs the butterfly effect as romantic metaphor. The
poem's structure enacts its theme by moving from the micro (smile,
butterfly) to the macro (lifelong love, tornado) in a way that reflects
the causal chains it describes.
Irony operates as a dominant rhetorical mode throughout the collection.
It ranges from gentle wit to savage satire. 'Grand Daughter' exemplifies
the former: when asked to care for grandfather, the six-year-old
declines, declaring "he's a difficult / project to handle." The child's
inadvertent reduction of grandfather to "project" captures a
contemporary therapeutic discourse of the speaker's self-aware
recognition of his own difficultness. More bitter is the irony of
'Celebrity,' which deflates social ambition: "Your name will die with
you / if you pride in moving / across crowded room / with free scotch
scratching / nude back of 2-minute friends." The poem's conclusion, "who
smile to find way / deep inside you and / whisper between twisted
sheets." These lines sexualize social climbing. At the same time it
suggests the ultimate futility of such pursuits.
Style, Vision, and the Poetics of Disenchantment
Singh's poetic vision might be characterized as one of unillusioned
clarity. One could term it that, in Matthew Arnold's words, a poetry of
'high seriousness' that nonetheless refuses consolation. Arnold's
formulation in 'The Study of Poetry' that the best poetry possesses
'high truth and seriousness' which finds fulfillment and complication in
Singh's work. The poems certainly aspire to truth-telling, particularly
regarding aging, desire, and political corruption. At the same time,
they undermine their own gestures toward meaning through irony and
self-reflexivity.
The collection's title, Drifty Silence and She, itself encodes this dual
focus. It fuels binaries, silence as absence and presence with drift as
aimlessness and motion. The phrase 'drifty silence' indicates the quiet
of disengagement. This aligns with existentialist philosophy,
especially Albert Camus's concept of the absurd. Singh explicitly
invokes in 'Treachery': "I seek solace in / Camus's absurd my silence /
and indifferent universe." The speaker's alignment with Camusian
absurdism positions him in a tradition of philosophical poetry as well.
This tradition includes Wallace Stevens and Fernando Pessoa. These are
the poets who similarly grapple with the absence of transcendent meaning
while refusing nihilistic despair.
The 'She' of the title operates multiplicity: as beloved, as muse, as
the feminine principle, as nature itself. The tanka and haiku sections
in particular center on female figures, rendered through synecdoche
(lips, breasts, curves) or metonymy (scent, touch, voice). This
representational strategy invites feminist critique. It risks reducing
women to 'body parts and objects of the male gaze.' Whether they
interrogate that gaze or simply reproduce it is less clear. The above
lines also invoke a clear similarity with the conventions of the
'blazon'. These lines call to mind a poetic practice that was widely
used in Elizabethan and Renaissance literature. Such descriptions were
intended to celebrate beauty and admiration. This creates a sense of
fragmentation. The presence of an observing gaze is there that shapes
how the body is viewed. In this way, the lines not only reflect the
stylistic charm of the blazon but also echo deeper cultural and
aesthetic implications. However, Singh's treatment of the feminine
occasionally transcends this limitation, as in 'Lovely as Ever.' It
celebrates woman and tree as parallel figures of nurture: "a woman and a
tree / feeding hungry mouths / shelter birds and beasts / nurture men
and spirits / shower bliss on all." Here the feminine principle extends
beyond the erotic to encompass the maternal and the ecological. One
finds suggestions of a more capacious vision.
The spiritual dimension of Singh's poetry warrants careful attention, as
it runs more through negation and skepticism rather than affirmation.
Poems such as 'Beggar' critique religious dependence: "Eternal beggar: /
always asking God for help / in everything from / meeting to
love-making and / managing daily affairs." The poem characterizes faith
as infantilizing dependency and reducing divinity to 'a convenient tool'
for 'fulfillment of desires.' This critique recalls Freudian
psychoanalytic readings of religion as wish-fulfillment. Moreover, it
connects with Freud's The Future of an Illusion, although Singh's tone
is more sardonic than analytical.
The poet's skepticism coexists with moments of residual spiritual
longing. Furthermore it creates what might be termed a poetics of
'negative capability,' borrowing Keats's concept of the capacity to
remain 'in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable
reaching after fact and reason.' In 'Flecks of Light,' the speaker
locates illumination "hidden in darkness / drifty silence,"
demonstrating that silence itself may constitute a form of spiritual
experience, albeit one divested of traditional religious content. This
recalls the apophatic tradition in mysticism, symbolizing that the
divine is approached through negation rather than assertion, even as
Singh's silence seems more existential than mystical. In this
collection, it is born of epistemological humility rather than
theological conviction.
Critical Assessment and Personal Response
Drifty Silence and She is notable for its formal range, thematic
involvement and unflinching honesty. Singh's adaptation of Japanese
poetic forms to Indian contexts demonstrates the possibility of
transcultural poetics, thus, creating a work that is simultaneously
rooted in specific cultural experience along with being formally
cosmopolitan. The collection's movement from longer poems through
micropoems to haiku and tanka creates a compelling architecture for a
reader. Here the progressive formal compression mirrors the speaker's
movement toward silence and acceptance.
The book's strengths are multiple. Firstly, Singh's technical facility
across varied forms shows fine versatility. The poet moves from
discursive free verse to compressed imagistic modes. Secondly, the
thematic integration of the collection creates genuine unity of purpose.
Despite the formal variety, the poems speak to one another and develop
interlocking concerns across different registers. Thirdly, the
collection's honesty regarding aging, desire and disillusionment offers a
necessary corrective to poetry that usually sentimentalizes or
aestheticizes these experiences. Singh refuses easy consolation. He
insists on the complexities and indignities of lived experiences.
Yet, the relentless focus on disappointment and decline, howsoever
honest, occasionally becomes monotonous, particularly in the longer
titled poems. The political poems, being incisive in their critique,
sometimes veer toward predictable targets and familiar arguments.
Moreover, the representation of women in the erotic poems occasionally
reduces the feminine to body and sensation. While poems like 'Lovely as
Ever' gesture toward the collection as a whole, it tends to position
women as objects of desire, sites of frustration, or figures of nurture
rather than subjects in their own right with agency and a human heart.
What I find most compelling in Singh's work is its resistance to false
transcendence. Singh's insistence on disenchantment feels both bracing
and necessary in an era when much poetry seeks consolation in nature,
spirituality or aesthetic beauty. His best poems achieve what one might
call "a beauty of clarity," because here the aesthetic pleasure derives
from precise articulation of difficult truths. The haiku "full moon / a
frozen dot - / deaf beyond" exemplifies this aesthetic: the image is
stark, even bleak, yet possesses a formal perfection that metamorphoses
observation into art.
Similarly, 'Old Files' achieves a kind of negative epiphany: "I burn my
years and erase / memories that couldn't be stacked / against the wall
of a broken home." The poem enacts its own argument, moving toward
acceptance through renunciation. The final lines, "let me live life
through my self / doing nothing thinking nothing / just sitting silently
and watching / time takes care of the rest and life too,' articulate a
Zen-like acceptance that nonetheless refuses to prettify or
spiritualize.
Conclusion: The Poetics of Endurance
Ram Krishna Singh's achievement lies in articulating the texture of
lived experience in all its complexity, disappointment and occasional
beauty. Singh writes from and toward silence, creating a poetics that
acknowledges the limits of language while insisting on the necessity of
continued utterance.
The collection's dedication to Renza Agnelli, with her posthumous
affirmation that 'no one should be left behind,' provides an ethical
framework for reading Singh's work. Despite the speaker's
disillusionment, the poems themselves constitute acts of witness and
connection as they reach the readers across the silence. In this sense,
the collection enacts its own argument: that even poetry of
disenchantment can create the possibility of recognition and solidarity.
Singh's achievement is to have written poems that refuse easy comfort
and yet offer the consolation of accurate perception. The poet insists
on the dignity of unflinching attention to what is.
For readers seeking poetry that engages contemporary experience with
formal intelligence and emotional depth, Drifty Silence and She rewards
careful attention. Singh's voice is distinctive and necessary, offering
perspectives often excluded from contemporary poetry's dominant modes.
It is a book that speaks to our present moment along with engaging
enduring questions of meaning, connection and mortality, a book that
insists, finally, on the value of continuing to speak even in the face
of silence.
Bibliography
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Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Edited and translated by Caryl Emerson, University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
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Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.
Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. Translated by Justin O'Brien, Vintage, 1991.
Freud, Sigmund. The Future of an Illusion. Translated by James Strachey, W. W. Norton, 1989.
Keats, John. Selected Letters. Edited by Robert Gittings, Oxford University Press, 2002.
Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, 1975, pp. 6-18.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. Vintage, 1979.
Shklovsky, Viktor. "Art as Technique." Russian Formalist Criticism: Four
Essays. Translated by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, University of
Nebraska Press, 1965.
Singh, Ram Krishna. Against the Waves: Selected Poems. Authors Press, 2021.
Drifty Silence and She: Selected Poems & Micropoems. Edizioni Universum, 2025.
Knocking Vistas and Other Poems. Authors Press, 2024.
Poems and Micropoems. Southern Arizona Press, 2023.
Ueda, Makoto. Basho and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary. Stanford University Press, 1991.
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. 1855. Modern Library, 2001.
Isha Singh
Reviewer
https://www.midwestbookreview.com/rbw/mar_26.htm#ishasingh
