As an accomplished poet, storyteller, critic, and translator, Kanwar Dinesh Singh is an important figure in contemporary Indian English poetry. During his writing career, he has published several volumes of poems, mini poems, haiku, senryu, and microfiction, alongside books in literary criticism and translation. He is the winner of the prestigious 2002 Himachal Pradesh State Sahitya Akademi Award and the 2023 Unicorn Best Author Award for Poetry, among several other awards and recognitions. He has written extensively on nature, love, morality, God, and several philosophical issues of life and existence.
Kanwar Dinesh Singh is a prolific bilingual poet endowed with emotional vigour, and philosophical-spiritual vision. He shows an insightful awareness of the ironies, ambiguities, and intricacies of human existence in the contemporary world. His treatment of highly complex philosophical issues in a simple and effortless manner is truly outstanding.
Most of Singh’s poetry stems from the matrix of perennial hope―having all-embracing faith in the inherent goodness of humanity and the inexorable spirit of universal wellbeing contained in it. His poetry spreads uninterrupted rays of hope in today’s extremely complex age, which all too often is full of despair, negativity, fear and confusion. Singh’s poems have a spiritual consciousness in which the experience (a latent phenomenon) of his inner voyage is cherished. He firmly believes that it is not only the edifice of life, built on the foundation of spirituality, that is immensely strong, but also the fragrance of peace that prevails in it.
Singh sees spirituality as being separate from religious rituals, and conventions. His search is for the eternal, all-pervading, and inherent truth in all beings in God’s creation. He believes that the human mind is so diminutive that it can see the multi-splendoured creation of God only from a single point of view, always raising new dilemmas and unnecessary questions. Hence, the complexity of this-worldly life and existence can be understood only by non-duality towards God. He sees ‘non-duality’ as the panacea for all human ills.
To Singh, nature is a delightfully rich source of images, metaphors, similes, and symbols and feeds his imagination: “Through the woods / I bushwhack searching / For the ambushed realities.” He adores nature as a manifestation of the divine: “These trees are / God’s manifest / Bow to them.” He exhorts his readers to take lessons from nature: “For the sustenance / Of humanity / Trees stand vowed.”
Singh’s poetic vision is essentially spiritual and mystical, seemingly an attempt to understand the essence of divine activity (pastimes) in the workings of nature: “Betwixt light and shadow / There prevails / A strange symbiosis.” He conceptualizes the presence of the Divine in everything and everywhere in nature: “Heaven is everywhere He spreads . . . / Hell is where God is not . . .” Thus, like a true romantic and mystic, Singh experiences God’s presence in copious forms of nature and connects them with his faith. His integral and inclusive vision puts his love for God in a clearer perspective: “For God is everywhere.”
Singh’s volume of mini poems, Thinking Aloud, reveals the most profound truths of life, existence and divine creation in three to nine lines. In just fifteen words, the poem ‘Like a Candle’ encapsulates Singh’s outlook and philosophy of life: “I burn and burn / to leave / no ash / but only wax / to be burnt again.” Another piece ‘monotony’ exemplifies the sharpness of his poetic vision: “a moment of spanogyny / everything goes haywire / even the worldwright / sits in idlesse.” Noted novelist-poet Amrita Pritam aptly describes Singh’s mini poems as “the sound of silence like ripples of water.”
With amazing economy of words, Singh’s haiku poems also reflect the deepest secrets of the bond between man and nature: “Spring a nine days’ wonder / Proms over the corses / Of numberless leaves,” and “Bald trees loom / In fantast conjectures / Sombre agape.” Noted New Zealand poet Patricia Prime rightly observes in Singh’s Soundings (tristich poems): “These deceptively simple poems have an almost prayer-like quality about them, and each could be taken at the beginning of the day as a starting point for meditation.”
In his volumes House Arrest, The Frosted Glass, and Thoroughfare, Singh’s approach to the complex realities of life is essentially philosophical. In his short poem, ‘World’, his looking at the world through a child’s eyes raises a profound epistemological query about the eternal truth that varies in the vision of mortals, though, in reality, it remains the same: “My vision of the world / Is puerile. / I open my eyes / and the world exists; / I close my eyes / And the world packs up. / The myth of creation / Alters with a blink.” His poem, ‘A Dream of Death,’ is a paradigm of his imaginative skill and presents an awful/powerful image of death, swallowing all beings equally as the inevitable truth of this world.
Singh is a distinctive voice among contemporary poets, as he meditates deeply on the impermanence of human existence and accepts death as the common destiny of all beings on earth, and thus, as a poet of hope and spiritual consciousness, he stands lonely but unflinchingly against the existentialist outlook of most post-Independence Indian English poets.
In a mini poem, Singh presents an arresting image of rainwater deluging the roads for a brief stint, thereby implying the transient existence of mortals on the earth, which creates an unforgettable place in the mind of a sympathetic reader: “Don’t think I’ll deluge / I’m only / a winterbourne / meandering / on the roads / I’ll avaunt / by the rainopause.”