Review by: Bill Waters
Ram Krishna Singh.
Authorspress, New Delhi, 2024
$25.00 Pb; 94pp
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. 
Bill Waters
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.
***
Bio: Bill Waters is a broadly published poet/writer, perpetual reader, talented editor, and renowned haikuist. He
lives in Pennington, New Jersey, USA.
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