Ram Krishna Singh’s Leaves of
Silence: Poems and Micropoems
Reviewed by
Princy Kumari
Ph.D. Research Scholar
&
Professor Binod Mishra
Department of HSS,
Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee,
Uttarkhand, India.
Leaves of Silence: Poems and Micropoems| Poetry | Ram Krishna Singh |
Authors Press, 2025, INR 295, pp. 97
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.