Knocking Vistas and
Other Poems by Ram Krishna Singh
Reviewed by
Bill Waters
New Jersey, USA
Knocking Vistas and Other Poems | Poetry | Ram Krishna Singh
Authorspress, 2024, $25.00, pp. 94
ISBN: 978-93-6095-669-1
R. K. Singh’s latest volume of poetry
is not easy to categorize because this widely published, award-winning poet has
magically squeezed the entire world into it.
Visually, the poems in Knocking
Vistas are bare-bones, relying on line breaks and expanded spacing
between certain words and phrases to frame the structure. Punctuation marks and
capitalization are used only as absolutely necessary, which has the effect of
inviting — even requiring — the mind to linger on lines and the mental images
they create.
And there is a lot to linger over!
This thought-provoking collection portrays life primarily as an overlapping collage
of battlefields. Gaza is the obvious one; less overt are the arenas of
politics, religion, technology, psychology, sociology, the media, sexuality,
and the aging human body. At the heart of the majority of these poems is the
ongoing struggle to cope with (and make sense of) the blunt truths and sharp
pangs encountered over a long life.
The first 34 poems of this book
require only a page each to communicate their messages, while poems 35 through
38 break the single-page barrier to create a different kind of reading
experience. “Melting Elements”, called “an experimental long poem”, fills 14
pages with alternating stanzas of five and three lines each. “Love Hides” is a
haiku sequence of 3 pages. And “Knocking Vistas” is divided into two separate
poems: the first a grouping of five-liners spread over 13 pages, and the second
a grouping of three-liners, spread over 16 more.
The book concludes with a laudatory
essay entitled “The Narrow Road: R. K. Singh’s Haiku, Tanka and Beyond” by
Kevin Marshall Chopson, poet laureate of Gallatin, Tennessee. “The melding of
the literal and metaphorical into a space that is beyond language that grounds
us in the now but is simultaneously transcendent,” says Chopson, “is quite the
trick. Ram Krishna Singh is able to do this in this poetry, particularly in his
own species of haiku. In this regard, Singh has become a master magician, an
alchemist — taking base metals and turning them into gold.”
Knocking Vistas offers a penetrating perspective
on life through the eyes of one who has seen it all.