The Cultural Reverence
#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.
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. Bashō and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary. Stanford University Press, 1991.
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. 1855. Modern Library, 2001.
Author : Isha Singh ©®
India
All Rights Reserved To The Author
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
