The Flow of Soul: Selected Poems

Kanwar Dinesh Singh, with his simple, straight-from-heart and easy-to-read poetry, has emerged as an important signature in the modern Indian poetry in English. His verses are characterised by the cadence which stirs any understanding heart with their warmth and immediacy of appeal. These deceptively simple poems contain deeper symbolic patterns, which are evocative of the various paradoxes, ironies and complexities of human existence. The apparently plain descriptions carry many-layered meaning, which make a delightful reading of these poems. Patricia Prime puts it aptly: "Olson’s axiom—"Simplicity is not simple"—holds true for Singh’s verse….His is the art that conceals art: rarely a word out of plane, little exposition, less decoration, yet complex……The poems are intense, romantic, erotic and conventional—sometimes all at the same time….Singh is eclectic about his allegiance, free from the intermittent debates of earlier generations about a right and proper style for poetry. At the same time, he shares a poetic rhetoric that is open and hard-edged. What is most significant about Singh’s creative sensibility is the freshness of his vision, his binary vision—that of envisioning modernity slang with revisioning the tradition. His sense of rootedness in the native tradition and milieu is something momentous. The thematic matrix of his poems is remarkably diverse. Love, nature, religion, culture, ethics, morality, social concerns and certain philosophical issues concerning life, death, self and God—all make up for his poetic outlook.