Isha Singh's Academic Review of DRIFTY SILENCE AND SHE
#WeekendPublication February 21, 2026
An Academic Review of Ram Krishna Singh’s Book – “Drifty Silence and She” by Isha Singh, India
Rage Against the Dying Light: A Critical Engagement with Ram Krishna Singh’s Drifty Silence and She
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 meThe 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.”thod 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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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.
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Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, 1975, pp. 6–18.
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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. Bashō and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary. Stanford University Press, 1991.
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. 1855. Modern Library, 2001.
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Know The Author : Isha Singh recently completed her M.A. in English Literature from Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi (2023-2025), specializing in contemporary poetry, feminist narratives, and digital humanities. She has presented two peer-reviewed papers at international conferences, “The Algorithm as Storyteller: Human Values in the Age of AI-Generated Narratives” (Stories Matter Conference, BHU 2025). Her research interests include Indian English poetry, transcultural poetics, and critical theory. She has also worked as an editorial writer for The Lantern Tribe Youth Magazine and holds a certificate in Mathematical Linguistics and Engineering from IIT-BHU
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Drifty Silence and She is available on https://www.amazon.it/Drifty-silence-Selected-poems-micropoems/dp/B0G4SKM2N7
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