RAM KRISHNA SINGH

Collects all of my published poetry books. Also provides an uptodate view of my poetry, especially haiku and tanka.

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Location: Govindpur, Dhanbad, Jharkhand, India

Ram Krishna Singh is an Indian poet and academic, whose main fields of interest consist of Indian English writing, especially poetry, and English for Specific Purposes, especially for science and technology. Born on 31 December 1950 in Varanasi, India, he has authored more than 160 research articles,170 book reviews and 45 books. His works have been anthologized in over 150 publications. Dr Singh's poems have been widely translated and explored in several M.Phil. and Ph.D. theses. Till recently,Professor of English at IIT-ISM, Dhanbad,he is now happily retired and pursuing his literary interests.

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Sexless Solitude and Other Poems: A Reivew by Gwilym Wiliiams

From:
http://poet-in-residence.blogspot.com/2008/08/r-k-singhs-sexless-solitude-and-other.html

Saturday, 23 August 2008

R K Singh's Sexless Solitude and Other Poems
There's a lot of R K Singh in his forthcoming book Sexless Solitude and Other Poems. Poet-in-Residence readers will be familiar with the exotic, spiritual, sexual and darkly threatening unsettling qualities of Singh's work.
Most of the poems in Sexless Solitude and Other Poems are vignettes of a dozen or so lines, as you'd expect from this poet, but their short length is very often their strength. In their brevity lies their force. You cannot read more than a few lines of R K Singh before you start squirming in your seat wondering when the next punch to your solar plexus, or even lower down, is going to come.
Singh writes about many things; often of what he sees on a day to day basis in the streets of an Indian city. Sometimes he comes across as a lone voice crying in the wilderness. Frustration with life, existence, meaning, dirt, smell, sex, God, and consequently the driving need to explore these themes is never far away.
Barbed Wire Fence begins with typical Singh bluntness - a kind of warts and all poetry to put you through the wringer; gone is any hope of salvation - no description of pleasant fauna and flora, as with D H Lawrence, to help the poetic medicine go down -
My window opens
to the back of a garage
where guards make water
Don't Condemn Me opens the collection. It's nothing if not straight to the point -
It's all linked but I don't understand
or don't want to understand because
I am too much with me and worry
about her dying libido
and my own shrinking sex . . .
Where R K Singh scores high for me is when he looks at the world and the ugly things in it, which he often does. I enjoyed, if enjoyed is the right word, the metaphorical poem Dying Light, a reflection of our times, which begins -
Spiders' network
gleaming with corpses
that have no face
What's really behind R K Singh's unceasing output of verse? is a question I have asked myself more than once. Why does he strive so long and hard? Is there here an eternal search for some universal truth? Or is it simply anger at the way the world, and India, is?
On the other hand I sometimes feel like an intruder, one who forgot to knock at the door, a stranger witness to an act of poetic masturbation. An ejaculation of poetry is certainly taking place -
I secrete poetry like semen
Singh informs the reader in the poem
I'm Different
and different he certainly is. But it's a refreshingly honest no-holds-barred difference.
By exploring the work of R K Singh we may not only come to understand something of the world of this unique poet but may also come to discover more secrets about ourselves and the world in which live and have our being.
The title poem Sexless Solitude brings the reader to a wonderful image.
. . .she dwells on moonbeams
I can see her smiling
with wind-chiselled breast
in sexless solitude. . .
It's been a pleasure to share your world R K.
- Gwilym Williams

Thursday, August 07, 2008

VILLAINY

Covering with soil
their illwill excreted
from the anus at my gate
in the morning even sun
despises villainy


--R.K.SINGH