The wings of my thought
are too short to climb God’s height
or blue deeps of peace:
I stand on the edge of
earth’s physicality
Here is the gentle, self-directed irony of a mature voice: a voice that expresses delight in his contact with God. The poet is keen to ensure that events and feelings are preserved in some way. In the following poem, for example, there is rhythm in the house caused by its small movements:
elements clack
in the small house shudder
the harp and strings
There is some wonderful material in these pages which brings to life a time of prayer, in which the poet is unable to make contact:
on the prayer mat
the hands raised in vajrasan
couldn’t contact God –
the prayer was too long and
the winter night still longer
Singh’s use of sound to stitch his words over lines is glorious. His ability to give us the unadorned and the prettier parts in the same small verse, making an elegy, a love song or a prayer, is remarkable. Here is his thought about people who worship god in prayer, although their hearts are not pure:
psalms or no psalms
workers of iniquity
shoot their arrows
with praising lips and god
flees to see their shrewd schemes
In the following two love poems, the concentration on capturing the ephemeral and holding it tenderly on the page for the reader to appreciate is very clear.
as I repose in
the wrinkles of her face
I feel her crimson
glow in my eyes her holy
scent inside a sea of peace
and
love is the efflux
from her body spreading
parabolic hue –
enlightens the self I merge
in her glowing presence
In these five-line or less poems there is no punctuation, nothing holding the poem down on the page. The light touch of the poet as he observes the candle lighting the dark in the following poem is so deft, so graceful, it is no more than the shadow of something otherworldly:
awake in dream time
I look for the candle –
love’s invitation
lighting up in the dark
and sing the body’s song
Singh uses the shadowy effect again in a poem that features “a cloud-eagle” and a “soundless sea”, suggesting the setting that is perhaps beside the beach:
a cloud-eagle
curves to the haze
in the west
skimming the sail
on soundless sea
candling in vein
leave marks of teeth on her neck
utter holiness
These are poems about being wholly present where you are, literally, absorbed in life , but they are also a meditation on ageing and one’s own mortality. The poet’s relationship with his wife invests the poems with a tender poignancy. But lacking an anti-ageing potion or the nectar of the gods, we have only poetry. No doubt, Ram Krishna Singh’s poems will nourish our hearts and minds.
float over the hill
the autumn circle of smoke –
her long hair streaming
Readers will surely enjoy soaring with these poems and rediscover within themselves – be they male or female – elements of the divine whose presence lifts us out of the humdrum and gives us wings.
-- Patricia Prime, New Zealand Poetry Society
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Ram Krishna Singh, born, brought up and educated in Varanasi, is a retired university professor whose main fields of interest consist of Indian English writing, especially poetry, and English for Specific Purposes, especially for science and technology. He has taught English language skills to UG and PG students of earth and mineral sciences and engineering for about four decades.
He has authored more than 160 research articles, 170 book reviews and 42 books, including Savitri: A Spiritual Epic (1984), Indian English Writing: 1981-1985: Experiments with Expression (1987, rept 1991), Using English in Science and Technology (1988, rept 2000, 2010), Recent Indian English Poets: Expressions and Beliefs (1992), Psychic Knot: Search for Tolerance in Indian English Fiction (1998), New Zealand Literature: Some Recent Trends (1998), Multiple Choice General English for UPSC Competition (2001), Communication in English: Grammar and Composition (2003), Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri: Essays on Love, Life and Death (2005), Teaching English for Specific Purposes: An Evolving Experience (2005), Voices of the Present: Critical Essays on Some Indian English Poets (2006), English as a Second Language: Experience into Essays (2007), English Language Teaching: Some Aspects Recollected (2008), Mechanics of Research Writing (2010), and Writing Editing and Publishing: A Memoir (2016).
His published poetry collections include My Silence (1985), Above the Earth’s Green (1997), My Silence and Other Selected Poems (1996), The River Returns (2006), Sexless Solitude and Other Poems (2009), Sense and Silence: Collected Poems (2010), New and Selected Poems Tanka and Haiku (2012), I Am No Jesus and Other Selected Poems, Tanka and Haiku (2014), and You Can’t Scent Me and Other Selected Poems (2016). Some of his poems have been translated into French, Spanish, Romanian, Albanian, Crimean Tatar, Arabic, Farsi, Russian, Irish, Chinese, Japanese, Serbian, Croatian, Slovene, Bulgarian, Italian, German, Portuguese, Greek, Esperanto, Hindi, Punjabi, Kannada, Tamil, and Bangla.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
Shipping:
US$ 12.44
From United Kingdom to U.S.A.
Book Description Paperback. Condition: Brand New. 66 pages. 8.00x5.00x0.15 inches. This item is printed on demand. Seller Inventory # zk1975993845