Poetry Review : ‘Musings of Desire’ by Amit Radha Krishna Nigam

I am not an amazing reader of poems, nor do I like to review them. Reasons could be many, but I do like to read them, every now and then. But Amit Radha Krishna Nigam’s poems did touch a chord, and a nerve. 

It does not begin too well; I did not understand them to review. So, I began ‘Not Sonnets’.

Then began the ‘Musings of Desire’, and changed my entire view of this collection. With an introduction with ‘After a Long Time’, the poems began their slow walk.

But one summer might find

One winter might recollect

Upon the autumn leaves

There, our happy footsteps.

As the reader reads on, h/she can feel the various emotions, sensations and react, as they understand it.

At the end of every poem, one sees the titles. Obviously, this is because the poet wanted to experiment. I did not think too much of this experiment, it was too much for me to handle.

The poems go on to describe what the poet felt in ‘Timestamps of Words’, ‘Go’, ‘Distances’, and ‘Memory Shifts’. The poetry continues in the same mode through, ‘By the Docks’.

Through ‘Reconstructing Square’, ‘Goodbyes’, ‘End of a Beautiful Relation’, ‘The Gift of Love 1 and 2’ , ‘Possessions’, the poetry goes on and it is not difficult to fathom the feelings of nostalgia, which the poet goes through.

Then, we move on to ‘Our World’. The poet attempts to find his bearings, with ‘Where are my Roots’. He seems to have left the docks behind him, as he describes, ‘I stopped killing mosquitoes because I can’t’, and ‘Preventing Malaria’.

He touches wonderful heights with the devotion in his collection, in ‘From the Book of Krishna and Other Verses’. The poems take on a new mode with ‘The Essence of the Mystic Devout Sudama’ and ‘The Essence of Peace’.

The poet touches upon the ‘Untitled’ verses. ‘On Egoism’ and ‘Dorothy Parker’ remain truly untitled in this class of poems. ‘My Heart Cries Today’ and ‘Musing on Obituaries’, which talks of ‘Sky’s Leak – For the people of Bhopal’ and ‘On Farmers Suicide’ are poems that touch sadness and death and could leave you with a melancholic feeling.

He brings the collection to an almost ordinary end, with ‘The Nature of a Seeker’ and ‘From the Notebook’. He adds ‘Some Songs and Verses’ right at the end.

On this extensive collection of poems, which started alright, moved on to beautiful and heart touching, and then up to waters in the docks, before moving on to devotional poems, and mused on the obituaries.

The poetry collection touched us in different ways. From feelings of

crawling to joyous, to love, to the logical, to appealing, sometimes unhappy and miserable, and then, to funny and delightful. This collection does not maintain a certain set stream, though the poems are in themselves, an excellent collection. They tend to unearth the vivid nature of the world.

I did notice a few spelling and grammatical errors though, but they seem few and far between. Overall, I would recommend this book, but I would say that, one must take the time and read it over a few leisurely weeks.